DEV Community: CowBerry

Navigating the Infinite Jest: Twitter(X) Garbage Collection system for Personal Growth

CowBerry — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 10:07:39 +0000

I have a confession to make. 2 Years ago I was a Twitter junkie.

Before you stop reading please do me a favor. Go to the screen time on your smartphone and check how much time you spend every day on social media. It is a lot, isn't it? Do you feel you're getting enough value for your time? Let me guess. The answer is hours and not much value. It was the same for me.

This article is about how I fixed it. And you can too.

So what is the article about again? (summary)

Twitter will always try to increase the time you spend there by serving you (enra/ enga)ging garbage content.
It's unrealistic to stop using Twitter. The only way to get better content is to curate it yourself using a chronological feed. Not the recommendation algorithm (For you).
Just like it's hard to throw out all the clothes you don't need. It's hard to clean up who you follow on Twitter (your following).
Cleaning up the following is much easier when one has a system for it.
We do this by exploiting our psychology. We move followings that we are not sure about to our secondary Twitter account. And then use the principle "Out of sight, out of mind"

... Hard to understand these bullet points? Let's read the article then!

What's wrong with using the "For you" Twitter feed?

Nothing if you want to be just entertained and everything if you want to actually learn something. Let me explain.

Maybe it's not clear, but the sole purpose of Twitter is to make money. Even though Elon says money played no role in his decision to purchase Twitter... Twitter still needs to generate enough revenue to pay for the servers, employees and to turn a profit.

If you worked at Twitter your number one priority would be to look at the number of minutes users spend on the platform and then figure out a way to make that number go up.

That's true for all social networks. They want users to spend as much time there as possible. Why? So they can monetize the users better by serving them more and better ads and by making them addicted (recurring revenue).

”Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.” Charlie Munger

The Infinite Jest. That is the end goal.

Have you ever noticed when you scroll on TikTok, how fast time flies by? And how hard it is to stop scrolling? It feels almost impossible to stop. And that's it. That's the goal in its final form. The Infinite Jest.

Algorithm so addictive users just can't stop scrolling. Algorithm so addictive that users rather keep scrolling than go out with their friends, have sex or even eat. Not even to mention doing something truly productive with their time.

The goal of all social media (including Twitter) is to keep you hooked. Let's keep that in mind.

The way they do that is by serving us entertaining and/or enraging content. That is content we really enjoy (on the lizard brain kind of level). Or content that makes us really angry. The problem is the most addictive and (enga / enra)ging content is usually complete garbage.

💡
We need to STOP asking ourselves "What can we do for Twitter"? (mindless scrolling, getting entertained and consuming ads) and START asking ourselves "What can Twitter do for us"? (how can we use it to learn and to become better)

Garbage in, garbage out

We've all heard that we're the average of the 5 people we spend the most time with. In other words. We are what we surround ourselves with.

And now just think about how many hours we spend on Twitter and other social media. Surrounded by posts from your virtual friends for hours every single day. And the almighty algorithmic feed is designed to serve us garbage. And as we all know, garbage in (our brains) -> garbage out (our thoughts and actions).

From garbage like news, whose sole purpose is to make every problem of the world our problem. Through politics, which divides and enrages like nothing else. To an endless stream of underaged? girls twerking in our faces. And we just can't stop consuming ...

How do we fight it?

There are only 2 ways to fight this.

Stop using social media. Unrealistic. Everyone is using it. Would cut you out from society.
Actively curate your feed and the time you spend on social media. On Twitter, you can still do this. Most other social media won't even allow you to choose what you see (no chronological timeline). Therefore I'd argue to cut off as much of the other social media as possible and concentrate on Twitter.

Now we will focus on how to curate the timeline on Twitter and become less of a bad content junkie.

Ask yourself. What is my goal in using Twitter? What value do I want to get out of it?

Do I want to get just entertained and enraged? If so then this approach is not for you buddy.

Do I wanna learn something new? Do I wanna grow in some area? Do I want to have my mind stimulated with how the word works? Do I want to get inspired by people that are years ahead of me? Do I want to learn a new language? Or do I just want to be informed about what's happening around me?

Asking these questions is crucial. Setting the goal/direction of what we want from Twitter is crucial. It is important so we can optimize the account. So it brings as much value as possible.

Please be as concrete and as honest with yourself as possible. Is it hard for you to choose a goal or direction? Just invert the question. Ask yourself: what I definitely don't want to follow? That's normally much easier to answer and will give us some scope to work with in the beginning.

Now we have defined for ourselves what we consider of value. Let's go further.

Where do we stand?

Let's consider using only the chronological feed. Then most of us here on this platform are probably getting some value out of Twitter. It's not an amazing value because we don't probably follow only high-quality people.

We probably had a Twitter account for years and accumulated 100s (1000s?) of people we follow. Some of those people might have stopped posting or they might have started posting different content than before. Or maybe we just gave them a follow-up during the pandemic and now their content is not relevant to us anymore.

In short. We follow a mixture of people. With no singular direction in mind.

We follow bad-content people and good-content people. ( High quality vs Low quality)
And irrelevant content people. (Quality doesn't matter. Their content doesn't align with our goal.)
Too many people. And the quantity overwhelms us. (Too many posts to consume.) This then forces us to use the For you recommendation algo which pushes entertaining garbage on us.

What do we want?

To get better feed we need to get to the great value zone.

We get there by

limiting the number of people we follow
by following the right people in accordance with our goal/direction.

This is so that we can go through their posts in a reasonable amount of time. (for me it's 30 minutes a day maximum).

In other words. We want to follow a small amount of high-value-added people.

To be able to do this we have to switch to the chronological timeline to bypass the Twitter algorithm (which is working against us)

How do we get there?

It's like when you know you need to clean your room overflowing with clothes. The hardest thing is not knowing what you need to do, but to actually do it. To actually throw the clothes out. And do it in a way it doesn't grow back in the future.

When we want to throw out something the little voice in the back of our heads says. "Maybe you'll wear this sometime in the future. Maybe you'll need to keep this if you ever wanted to do x or y..." And then we don't throw it out. And we keep it.

This way we get rid of a small amount of your clothes with lots of effort. And nothing prevents us from buying more clothes we won't need in the future again.

So how do we throw the clothes out? We trick ourselves and our inner voice!

We put all the clothes we haven't worn for a year in a box. We place the box in the basement. Then if we really need something we go to the basement and take it from the box. This though almost never happens. We know deep inside, that the clothes in the box will never be used again. Then after a year or 2, we lose all the emotional attachment to it and we can throw it out.

Our closet has a limited space and so does our brain. And cleaning our minds is to clean the content we consume.

But enough of philosophy.

Bro, Twitter ain't no clothes. System for Twitter

The easiest way to clean Twitter is to torch our account. But then we'd lose all the history and contacts... There must be a better way.

We unfollow the obviously non-value-adding following.
We create a secondary account. There we put the accounts (followings) we're not sure we should keep following. It's important that we don't use just the Lists feature (We want to create a mental and UX barrier to not go there much). The second account is our box in the basement.
Are you unsure whether the account brings value or not? Move it to the secondary account
- We go to the account of the tweet and check other tweets it has. Then either decide whether the account has some value for us, or not.
  - If not we unfollow the account.
  - If we remain unsure we move it to the secondary Twitter account.
- This can take some time if our following is huge. So we do it in stretches.
- And also we do it while browsing Twitter. Whenever we see a non-value-adding tweet.
We go to the secondary account from time to time and check whether they post bad-quality stuff or not. If it feels like it gives you nothing valuable, unfollow. This makes it easier to unfollow it with no regret.
We apply the same logic when we want to start following new people. The best way is to never add anyone whose content doesn't align with our goal.

How do I distinguish between good and bad content?

Are those people just posting content to get en(ga / ra)gement?
Are they shilling some of their products?
Is it political?
Is it news?
Is it diarrhea? (tweeting too much)
Do they use hooks? (Unclear clickbaity beginning of a thread to draw you in. And then sell you something later)
Have they just started Twitter? (Lindy effect)
Do they have Cryptopunk as their profile pic? ...

Always ask yourself. What is their motivation?

Is it someone like Paul Graham? Who posts valuable insights, has an awesome blog and is super successful aside from Twitter. Or is it someone like ... you know... most of the accounts in the For you section.

Thank you for reading the article to the end. If you wanna suffer some of my thoughts in the future follow me on X / Twitter. Content will come soon.

Got your first Dev job? Cognitive overload and how to avoid doing the same mistakes

CowBerry — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 11:16:11 +0000

Do you remember when you were driving a car for the first time? How new everything felt and how it seemed it was all too much to handle at once? You had to pay attention to the other vehicles, to navigate where you wanted to go, to shift gears, even to turn the steering wheel so you didn't crash...
Welcome to cognitive overload!

But really, what is it? Cognitive overload is when we're getting too much info that we need to act on. That might paralyze us or make us significantly slower while making unnecessary mistakes in the process.

Starting a new job with little experience

I felt similarly overwhelmed when I started my first remote back-end web developer job a year ago. I had very little experience at the time, just 9 weeks of boot-camp and everything was new to me.

I had to go through the on-boarding, initialize all the projects I would be working on, learn how our git flow works, who and how to ask for help when I get stuck, read and apply all of our cookbooks... and not to forget, I had to start contributing to our projects.

I felt confused, overwhelmed and scared that I wouldn't be able to learn all the things fast enough. That I wouldn't be able to contribute.

Seems familiar to you? Do you fear the same? Continue reading.

How to get better faster?

Most of the things mentioned above are relatively simple procedures and principles. The problem is, there are a lot of them and they are hard to remember and apply all together in the beginning. Hence the cognitive overload.

But What if I told you that you don't have to do everything right immediately in the beginning? You're not driving a car. You have time to think about what you're doing. You can even crash with little consequences.

But repeated crashing (repeating the same type of mistakes all over again) isn't welcomed.

Why not? Because someone more experienced than you has to help you and clean up your mess after you. Experienced developers are expensive. Especially in small growing companies often also overloaded with work. It's much easier to hire juniors than seniors. Don't be the junior that makes their work harder.

But really, how exactly do I get better faster?

Use the checklist Luke

Start working on your projects and do actual coding as fast as possible. That generates mistakes you can learn from.
When you make a mistake more than once (any mistake really e.g. naming of the feature on Gitlab, skipping someone in the code review flow, not migrating your database ...) write it down to your checklist.
Before you ask someone for help, create a merge request or do some kind of action that requires other people's attention. -> Go through your list.
Have you done / avoided everything on the list?
If yes. Create the merge request or ask your question and don't stress too much about it. If not, fix what you can fix before you do anything else.
Go through the list from time to time and think if you can add / remove / improve something.

What exactly does this checklist method do for me?

Helps you with your anxiety and cognitive overload. You're basically offloading your mistakes and fears onto a piece of paper. That piece of paper can be processed systematically by you, not relying on your memory and not requiring help from others. This piece of paper costs orders of magnitude less than the time of your peers.
You prevent yourself from putting more workload on other (senior) people.
It helps you to learn faster. To learn from one's mistakes is one of the most effective ways to learn. You can also use the checklist as flashcards.
Since it helps you to perform better it also makes you look better in front of others.

Is that all? That's all these lists are good for?

The best thing is, you can use this approach for almost everything. Not just for coding.

Can't fall asleep? -> Make a list of things you need to do before going to bed to maximize the probability of having a good night's sleep. (shades, water by the bed, no blue light etc)
Are you learning to play tennis? After the training make a list with all the mistakes your trainer pointed out to you. Then go through it and practice it later again alone.
Is your landlord ready to evict you? Sorry. This doesn't work in this case ... You can still follow the Wolf of Wall street advice though ;)

I still don't understand. Do you have an example of such a list?

Part of my back-end RoR checklist. What to check before pushing to Gitlab

pronto run -c develop(linter)
Is everything aligned the way it should be? (use indent rainbow Rubymine plugin).
rspec(testing library) , for the whole project if project small enough
Is all unused code in the app deleted (e.g. helper methods)?
Is everything in the location it's supposed to be? (helpers vs models vs controllers vs services etc.) and/or *e.g. are icons in the correct place in the folder? Are locales in the correct place?
- Is everything translated? Does the translation make sense?
Do the method names represent their actions?
- Is the naming in general consistent? e.g. variable names should reflect what's happening in the database, any redundant spaces, empty lines etc?
Have you created any complicated if statements? -> try using guard clauses instead.
Is your text DRY? Refactor. If you don’t know how to refactor, ask someone for help.
Have you used something like user_id: user.id instead of user: user ? Change it. Otherwise it adds unnecessary queries to the DB.

One more thing

There's a good chance others make the same mistakes as you.
What keeping a list helps you with is being able to see them all in one place and to think about possible bottlenecks in the flow your company is using. Then you can suggest improvements.

For example the linter and indentation problems from the beginning of the list above can be automatically avoided with pre-commit / pre-push hooks.