My year of rest and Twitter detoxification
What makes a “good” app, anyway?
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
It’s been one week since my last tweet 🤞 —Kate
In case you missed ICYMI: The weirdest part of the Blake Lively vs Justin Baldoni battle isn’t (only) that seven-minute voice note. Candice and I look in to how Hollywood PR machines are adopting fandom tactics to dominate internet narratives like this one:
It’s officially been one week since I deleted Facebook and Twitter. This, truthfully, was not that noble of an act. I only kept them around this long because the times that they were actually useful in my life and career had left a kind of lingering significance. Still, this was the first time I can recall fully deleting a social media profile in my entire life. It was a necessary catalyst for a larger move to completely rewire my relationship with my phone.
I’m still dependent on apps like Instagram and TikTok for work, so they, along with Substack, got moved to the “work” folder. But I’m not interested in total withdrawal from online life, so I pulled out four apps to place front and center on my home screen: NYT Games, Pinterest, Libby, and Goodreads (I know! That’s next!). If I can’t stop myself from picking up my phone to mindlessly scroll, then I can encourage that scrolling to happen on platforms that feel more productive.
And then I waited. For the moments when I’d try to view a tweet and then kick myself. For my screen time to remain completely unchanged even with the new home screen. For when, finally, I got bored.
In my “You might just have to be bored” essay, I argue that the act of stepping back from these platforms is somewhat monkish—a difficult sacrifice that’s ultimately worth it. I still stand by most of what I wrote, with one, I guess, encouraging update: I haven’t been bored at all. Those apps were just bad.
I mean this quite literally. They are doing a bad job of being apps. All it took was spending time on literally any other ones to see this. This past week, I went through, cleaned out, and updated my Goodreads for the first time in almost 10 years. I did the same with Ravelry, which is essentially a Goodreads for knitting. I also finally downloaded Letterboxd (pretend I never wrote this), and updated it with some of my most recent watches (Wallace And Gromit: A Vengeance Most Fowl? Five stars).
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These apps fall in line with what should be the point of apps in the first place: to help with real life. You can’t engage with them in a vacuum. To use Goodreads, you have to be reading. To use Ravelry, you have to be knitting. To use Letterboxd, you have to be watching (ideally going to see) movies. Even a visit to Pinterest, one of the pioneers of the infinite scroll, more often than not ends with me pinning something I’d like to do IRL—a sewing pattern I’d like to try, or a new way to organize my office.
These apps are companions, not black holes. And this used to be the case for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, too. For me, Facebook originally added a virtual social layer to high school life, but didn’t take away from us seeing each other in person almost every day. Instagram was for posting photos, which meant being somewhere or doing something to take photos of. Twitter was for sharing what was happening in your day, which required, y’know, something happening.
Now, a majority of the content on most platforms comes from a minority of “power users.” You can chicken-or-egg this debate, but I think it went like this: These platforms got more popular, more centralized, and had to start using more bespoke algorithms to manage all the content. Users, though, started gaming these algorithms, and the people who could crack them got all the views. Everyone else’s content was deprioritized, so they became disincentivized to keep trying. Now, most of us just lurk.
Once I understood this, it gave me the ick. To use any of the Big Three is to clock into my shift at the engagement factory, but only Meta or Musk make money. I finally saw what this study was talking about when it found scrolling makes you more bored. Once I switched to these more active, “companion” apps, I’m enjoying them more and my screen time has decreased. It’s because I’m not laying in bed digitally switching from abyss to abyss, but using them when relevant to the real-life thing I’m doing.
Changing this reflex has a trickle-down effect. On some days, I haven’t hit my time limits for Instagram or TikTok at all. As I gradually stop reaching for my phone as much, I have fewer and fewer opportunities to get stuck in a scroll hole. The less I do, the less scrolling feels like an obligatory part of my day. Instead, this week I finished The House Of Mirth, made progress on my sweater, and went to see Companion. Is the habit of compulsively documenting everything I do going to manifest as its own kind of issue? Listen—one problem at a time.