twitter, part one
I recently switched my default medium of doomscrolling from Reddit to Twitter, and there's been a surprisingly big change in what I see as well as how I think.
I've used Reddit as my primary way to consume scrollable content since 2017. At the time, my main use case was looking at memes and I think Reddit was the best platform for this. The other popular option was Instagram, but not the way it looks like now. You had to follow meme pages so that their posts showed up on your chronological1 feed. But there was a major flaw with this: meme accounts would usually start by posting good content, then when they became big enough they'd start posting ads. This was a fundamental flaw with following accounts as a proxy for following interests. I didn't really care about @dankmemes_daily or any specific account, I just wanted to see memes. This is now solved with the personalized algorithm that makes following obsolete altogether. But Reddit solved this for me before personalized feeds, with the concept of following communities rather than individual accounts. Now I could follow r/dankmemes and only see top posts from the subreddit, as curated by other followers of the subreddit. This makes much more sense, because I want to see "memes"—the idea or community—not any fixed collection of accounts.
Since then, most social media like Instagram and Twitter have evolved from chronological feeds to personalized algorithms, where following becomes less relevant. Reddit's experience hasn't fundamentally changed.
Nowadays my Reddit feed is mostly made up of tech industry news and discussion: I follow r/csmajors, r/cscareerquestions, r/technology, etc. When I hear any news, whether it's about layoffs or new LLM model releases, it's usually from Reddit and so my initial impression and opinions are heavily influenced by the Reddit hivemind. And now I realize, a lot of the takes on Reddit are very pessimistic. Every new model release will make it harder to find jobs as a CS grad. But also, AI is really bad and anyone claiming otherwise is lying. Whereas on Twitter, doomposting seems to be much less widespread. New model releases are met with general excitement and people show off cool projects they built with them. True "you can just do things" energy. Reddit will be filled with posts about people asking whether it's even worth trying to pursue a career in SWE, while Twitter will have posts about someone optimizing a kernel library, with CEOs in the replies asking if they want a job. It really is a different world. And it inspired me to start building projects again, and even start writing.
Of course, it's hard to generalize this phenomenon to the whole platform. I recall trying to get on Twitter in late 2024, around the time there was a dispute about H1-B visas between right wing tech and hardline MAGA. There was rampant anti-Indian racism on the platform at the time and I had to get off the app for the sake of my own mental health. I was turned away from the app ever since, until recently. Now I've been on here for about a month, but it's very different. Probably due to a combination of me curating my feed better, H1-B immigration being less of a currently debated hot topic2, and also personal growth (me realizing it doesn't matter). All this is to say that properties of the Twitter feed are ephemeral.
But still, I feel like I understand the general vibe of tech twitter. And I definitely understand the general vibe of tech Reddit, which I can say with confidence since it's more centralized. But I can't understand the reason for this difference.
Separately, it's probably not a good thing that my mindset is so malleable and so easily shaped by what I consume. But while I work on that, it wouldn't hurt changing what I consume, too.
Footnotes
-
Technically they already started moving from chronological to algorithmic feeds, but it was only re-ordering posts from accounts you already followed. It wasn't until later that they started experimenting with something closer to what we have today, concluding in the launch of Reels. ↩
-
This is picking up again as of today with the new DHS announcement, so let's see if the other two points still stand! ↩