Exactly two months ago, I embarked on a retreat from Twitter. The decision was a result of a belief that the 140-character essays had changed the way I consume information, for the worse — it had killed my attention span for long-form. I just couldn’t focus on reading lengthy articles any more. I’d find myself rapidly skimming through them. I just wanted to get to the next one — rather, the next tweet. A tweet would be instant gratification for my urge for knowledge. Twitter would be the first thing I’d check every morning, sometimes before my email, and often it would be my only source of news for the day. It seemed obvious that the culprit was Twitter. Hence, I retreated.

Information consumption

Fast-forward 2 months, and I’m skeptical whether the problem was really Twitter. When my retreat started, I started visiting my favourite direct sources of information on the web almost on a daily basis. It ended up taking a lot of time because there was no limit — I’d find most of the day gone into reading articles. What Twitter did was impose a limit. If you were done scrolling through your feed, clicking a few links from interesting tweets, you’d feel “done” and you could get back to work. The limit is essential to Twitter. Essentially, you’re hiring a bunch of people from around the world to curate content for you. Except, the currency on Twitter is not money but @replies and retweets. And it’s pay per use — but wait, is it really? How often do you unfollow people and follow new ones instead? It seems to me that people just follow and then they follow more. Barely there is unfollowing, I dare say. If I go all Unfollow on you, it’s probably because you talk a lot and your ratio of signal to noise is low — it’s usually an impulsive act on my part. From that perspective, it’s not really “pay per use”. It’s a monthly service, for life.

There’s a problem with that. The people you’re curating from won’t always share links you’re interested in reading. You still follow them in the hope that they might. Otherwise, what’s the point? You’re just reading through noise. But this hit-or-miss model is so uncertain and that’s why I feel like it’s not a sustainable model for information consumption.

The future

However, neither is ad-hoc visiting each blog or journal of interest. But I’m still going to try to do that. I feel more in control that way, as long as it isn’t at the cost of compromising on doing awesome work. Imagine if blogs curated themselves? I’d rather have Hacker News show me a post about a new front-end framework instead of one about emacs. But if I’ve learned anything about machine learning by attending a top computer science school, it would be that that shit can go wrong very easily and it can piss people off.

Or I might go back to RSS feeds again. Thanks to Google Reader’s shut down, I stopped using them. RSS feeds are better than ad-hoc, but sooner than later they start feeling like another email inbox where the dream of Inbox Zero is far, far away.

As far as long-form goes, Twitter or no Twitter I still find I’m struggling to read them. I think the problem wasn’t really Twitter. Twitter only fails to address the bigger problem at hand — information overload. And so do a thousand other services. It’s real, it’s everywhere and I don’t know how to deal with it. Technology will solve it one day. But it’s nowhere close to where it needs to be.

“What are you upto”

Nevertheless, Twitter is pretty good for briefly talking to yourself out loud and keeping in touch with friends old and new. A good chunk of people I follow I know them personally, whether really well or barely. And I just want to know what they’re up to, as opposed to “what’s happening”. It’s interesting. I want to know “what’s happening” from people I don’t know while I want to know “what are you upto” from people I know. This is a good reminder that textbox placeholders deserve more importance than what they get.

Anyway, enough banter — I’m calling my retreat off for those last few reasons. Ideally though, I’d love to keep in touch via email, since good ol’ email is still the best way to keep in touch. Drop me an email — don’t hesitate.