My advice to you: if you’re sane yet and love peace of mind, then stay away from that hell. I went there because it’s text-based largely & my logic was that if people write, then it would be better than those cringe reel shorts anyway. Also, every major actor, politician or scholar is there, so I was optimistic for some quality stuff. I thought it would be fun to talk to people and discuss ideas and thoughts with them.

But little did I know where I was heading, when I opened my feed, I saw many types of posts from geopolitical news to some mundane rant. When you’re new on any social media platform, the algorithm doesn’t know what you like or not, so it just shows you what’s trending at that moment, and then you click on one of the posts out of curiosity.

Say you clicked somebody, saying how hard their day was going and how we should take care of being burned out. You felt seen, and people below in the comment also added their views and experience, what we’re doing wrong and what needs to be done about this and all that. But things are not like they’re being observed; there is a game undergoing behind all this, and of which you’ve become a part.

The content economy

Gone are the days when you used to open Facebook or Instagram and see new pics uploaded from your friends, but today you open to see only influencers selling you this or that with their link in the description. The idea is simple: first, you post things to establish a niche and an audience, and when they subscribe to you in enough numbers, advertisers approach you to sell them their product, or you invent your own, like a course or some protein shake, maybe. This has become a default model of every platform; now, there is hardly an individual influencer with a significant following who is not selling something.

The same is now the story of X., and there you don’t even have to sell anything, but just earn the social currency called engagement on your posts. All you have to do is just buy the premium subscription plan and do the constant posting to get engagement on them, enough that it qualifies the monetisation criteria, and you will get paid for this. The fee paid by premium users is shared back with you on the basis of your content engagement.

So when the content is being produced not for you but for money, you become the product, and you need to be constantly retained & engaged in it by being manipulated by a similar kind of post which you mistook for authentic, genuine concern or taken by the influencer.

Ragebait machine

So, you will see a girl asking why men are afraid to date a divorced woman?

And now here is the problem, they deliberately ask provoking questions, to pull you in, commenting and unconsciously giving them what they want, engagement, which is called as rage baiting. They have nothing to do with the actual issue, nor do they care about it. Why I am saying they don’t care about it is because they, after doing the post, will just go cold and do not bother to come in for discussion. But chances are high that you may end up losing your cool with another user in the comment section with other side of view.

And guess what, after an hour or less, that same account will post another fresh question like, without women, men can’t survive.

As I said in starting if you’re sane then stay away from this hell.

You feel being manipulated or used, they didn’t close one post with coming in for discussion, but now they have dropped another question there, maybe you bear this in starting, but sooner you will feel suffocated in a place where there is no soul but an algorithm at work. Suddenly, your feed will start to flood with such rage bait posts, and you just can’t decide what to do.

Stay away, read books or go fishing instead

I like to read books, and in them I find quotes too, but their beauty lies in the fact that they’re being discovered embedded in a story, so you find them relatable, and they make you think too. But when you make a quote posting your business, it’s just losing weight, no matter who you are citing, because you will cite one more an hour later and more. Maybe you will say of course, Twitter is not for everyone, but that is my case. One must know what they want, as Socrates said, Know thyself. And I know I can’t afford that fakery all the time, I am a human, and I have blood that bleeds when I am hurt. I am not a machine who do not think and is not ready to give my humanity for the sake of likes and shares.