Twitter Policy
Browsing twitter is generally bad for me, and I suspect for most (though not all) people. I use careful guardrails to protect myself from it.
My own usage
Effectively, twitter is close to a write-only platform, for me.
I use typefully to write twitter threads, so that I can post things without needing to go to the twitter website itself.
I have twitter blocked on my main machine. I have a separate chromebook that I use to browse twitter itself. That twitter laptop is not in my house, I leave it at the house of some friends of mine, a few minutes walk from where I live.
If I do decide to check twitter, I'll walk over to that house and check twitter on on my twitter machine. Mostly that entails looking through and responding to my notifications, and possibly looking at the pages of some of my favorite people on twitter. (That said, I almost always regret this. I feel worse after browsing twitter, and don't learn very much from it.)
All of this is to avoid the dopamine loops of twitter, which can suck up hours of my life like nothing else can.
Contribution to the commons
The character of my personal setup makes me think that maybe it is unethical for me to use twitter at all. Posting, but mostly not reading other people's content, in particular, seems like maybe a defection. I
f it is so bad for me that I feel the need to set up thes kinds of safeguards, that's a hint that I don't want to be encouraging other people to use it by posting content there. I don't want to add my weight to the incentive to be on the platform. My guess is that twitter is only a little worse for me than for the median twitter user, though there are also twitter users for which it just straight up provides a ton of value.
To counter this, I add all my threads to threadreader, so that people can read my content without needing to touch the attention-eating cesspool.