I would strongly encourage you to not join. Sites like Reddit and others with Digg-style features, such as this very website, have inherently addicting properties. Social media is human communication as a skinner box, and there's a reason why we separate social media from the chat groups and BBS forums that predated.
Twitter is every addiction-creating property of the other services all rolled into one and cranked up to 11. Twitter has not been in a growth period in terms of users in a decade (and those numbers are NOT removing the bots) - all innovations have been focused not on bringing new people into the platform, but making the platform harder to escape.
There are things that can be done to improve Twitter. But there are inherent features to the core design of Twitter as a service (that were not intentionally malicious and instead a concession to SMS data caps during a time before smartphone adoption) that make Twitter a communication tool that sacrifices communication in favor of addictiveness.
I would strongly encourage you to not join. Sites like Reddit and others with Digg-style features, such as this very website, have inherently addicting properties. Social media is human communication as a skinner box, and there's a reason why we separate social media from the chat groups and BBS forums that predated.
Twitter is every addiction-creating property of the other services all rolled into one and cranked up to 11. Twitter has not been in a growth period in terms of users in a decade (and those numbers are NOT removing the bots) - all innovations have been focused not on bringing new people into the platform, but making the platform harder to escape.
There are things that can be done to improve Twitter. But there are inherent features to the core design of Twitter as a service (that were not intentionally malicious and instead a concession to SMS data caps during a time before smartphone adoption) that make Twitter a communication tool that sacrifices communication in favor of addictiveness.