Virtually all college-aged people in the United States use social media—Instagram, Snapchat and Tiktok are among the most popular apps, all having dominated a substantial part of the last ten to 15 years.
The massive acceleration of short-term content over the last decade has brought with it a stigma around excessive social media use. Terms like ‘doom-scroll’ are often used derogatorily or self-deprecatingly to poke fun at the sometimes mindless screen-time consumption we fall into. Following this, screen-time limits and concepts of mindfulness have risen in popularity among younger generations, suggesting pushback against the effects of diminishing attention spans.
Like pretty much all things, social media should ideally be used in moderation. This means that if someone spends ten hours on TikTok a day, they should cut down. But it also means that if someone doesn’t use social media at all, they’re potentially leaving something on the table.
Arguably, one avenue to capture the benefits while avoiding ‘doom-scroll’ risks is to use X, formerly known as Twitter. X is essentially an amalgamation of humor, sports, news and intellectual discussion, where users are potentially less prone to ‘rotting’ as they are on other platforms.
Twitter launched in 2006, which perhaps captures a slightly older audience than an app like Instagram. Bought by Elon Musk and rebranded to X in 2022, the app has since been a large source of controversy due to allegations that Musk’s free-speech attitude has caused an increase in hate tweets. The takeover by Musk and many of his nerdy, sometimes anti-social fans also didn’t necessarily help X’s cool factor. The app is relatively towards the social margins for college-aged people, not enjoying as much mainstream usage as apps like Tiktok, Instagram, and Snapchat.
But X has a lot going for it. For one, its algorithm is more in your control than a Tiktok algorithm, for example. While TikTok is adjusting its algorithm by the second as you watch—meaning it’s technically ‘faster’—X’s algorithm relies on your engagement. That puts a lot more control in your hands to elicit the content from X that you would like. If a sports game just happened that you care a lot about, you’ll get flooded with content from it as long as you like posts and look at comment sections.
In the same vein, the control you hold over your X feed means that it can serve a lot of purposes. One day on X might mean scouring a debate between academic scholars on a topic that interests you.
Over the next couple of days—depending on your mood—your feed might morph into something less sophisticated. Although it doesn’t allow you to connect with friends like other platforms, X packs a lot in and allows you to potentially consolidate your social media use into less apps, decreasing your overall doomscroll risk.
X also has, in my opinion, a distinctly clever type of content that could potentially refine your tastes and mature your sense of humor. X posts come in a lot of forms, but they classically consist of one witty, dead-pan sentence. And because you’re more in control of what you watch on Twitter than you are elsewhere, you can quickly find yourself in highly-specific niches. Observing a tweet where someone makes a joke that you know only you and a few others understand is a fulfilling experience more similar to reading a book than scrolling content made for broader audiences.
Of course, X does mostly feature short-term content, which in and of itself is a detractor in some eyes. Because of this—among other qualities of the app like its frequent negativity—I would definitely not endorse using X in copious amounts. But I don’t think that just because something is short-term content means that it’s a net-negative. If something is genuinely funny, interesting or informational, that likely outweighs the harm of relatively small amounts of scrolling.
In truth, you’re likely to experience X as less addictive than Tiktok or Instagram. It encourages less passive attention and more active engagement, and has a capacity for substantive discussions that other platforms lack simply because of their format. I would dissuade you from avoiding X out of fear of Musk-types, and also from obsessing too closely about your social media use. Anti social media trends, especially those in the name of health, are often directionally correct but obscure a lot of nuance. There is a lot to gain from X.