Kyle Labriola

...I've begun using browser extensions on Twitter and Tumblr that default my dashboard to "Original Posts Only", and move the retweets/qrts/reblogs to a separate timeline that I have to click to browse if I choose to.

I feel weirdly guilty about doing this, because I understand that retweets, qrts, and reblogs are crucial to discoverability, people getting their work out there, and emergency fundraising, but.................I just can't deal with the endless scrolling and the overwhelming noise anymore. It's too much. It rattles my head.

To be fair, I still see all that stuff on mobile, so it's not that I never see it anymore. But when I'm at my computer, I mostly just look at a clean timeline of original posts that the people I follow actually wrote themselves, not shared posts.

I wish these platforms had been designed inherently differently so that I didn't have to be pushed to this moment, but I legitimately just can't deal with seeing all the stuff that people share day-in and day-out. It's become numbing.

Not to sound too dire, but it sure seems like there's an uphill battle ahead for freelancers / creative folks on the internet.

Platforms and audiences are clearly migrating over to short-form video and livestreaming.

Platforms that were previously good at just being a good place for text or image posts are either crumbling under the weight of bad decision-making or have shifted priorities over to video.

There are new platforms and niche platforms that ARE good for posting your work, but they don't have enough users on them to actually build an audience. In other words, if a platform is good for creators and somewhat calm/ethically designed, it might not accumulate enough traffic for you to be able to find enough people to keep your business afloat.

I'm sure there's a lot of possible solutions (one of which is using Twitter less), but just FYI, if you use Chrome...

There's a Chrome Extension called "Tweak New Twitter" that completely removes the For You feed.

It also had some other handy Quality of Life features, like the option to put Retweets on their own feed so it doesn't clog up people's actual tweets.