On Twitter

Be careful with Twitter, they said. You’ll get addicted.

I said: don’t worry, I have it under control. I recognize you can get addicted to social networks; I’m doing this purposefully. I want to investigate how to hack dopamine hacking, in a way: how to use the dynamics that social networks exploit for my own benefit, or (stretch goal) for the benefit of society.

I still got hooked. I do believe a lot of what’s come out of it thus far is productive: I try to use Twitter as an open note taking tool, to “think socially” — to motivate myself to get my writing out there, even if it’s in bite sized chunks. But I’m also falling prey to the algorithm; one that, of course, I can’t control. The algorithm’s objectives are not my objectives; I can try to bend it, but I can’t replace it, so all in all Twitter is sometimes competitive instead of complementary.

In any case, these are what I consider the relative highlights of my Twitter career so far. I’ve set up go links for each of these to make referencing them easier.

• https://flancia.org/go/twitter-ai-safety, my post popular tweet ever — the result of playing with GPT-3 through AI Dungeon.
• https://flancia.org/go/twitter-bolo, where I comment bolo’bolo — an anarchist classic by p.m.
• https://flancia.org/go/twitter-clojure, where I try to learn Clojure (and mostly fail).
• https://flancia.org/go/twitter-gpt3, more about GPT-3.
• https://flancia.org/go/twitter-antisocial, where I comment Antisocial by Marantz.
• https://flancia.org/go/twitter-finding-chaos, where I comment Finding Chaos by Heather Marsh.
• https://flancia.org/go/twitter-philosophy, a thread I thought could be useful as a starting point to learn more about philosophy.
• https://flancia.org/go/twitter-encyclopedias, a thread about online encyclopedias.

I’ve also set up a trivial redirect from https://flancia.org/t/x to a Twitter search for ‘x’ in my account. Enjoy (?). E.g. https://flancia.org/t/agora.