Getting on the Nice List

Rebooting is a biweekly newsletter about how we can use technology to take better care of ourselves.

Before I started house sitting for my neighbor in sixth grade, most of my encounters with Tucson backyards involved in-ground pools, blistering hot cement, and dried-out grass.

Mrs. Young’s yard was different. She had traded the standard pool for a relaxing koi pond with a nice bench, and filled the rest of the yard with any plant resilient enough to survive the Tucson sun. The place was filled with colorful, fluttering hummingbirds and shy turtles who’d peek their heads out from time to time. Sure, I started helping her out for the money, but by the end of the summer, being in any other backyard felt like going back to work after a week of vacation.

Watching a multicolored school of fish hypnotically circling around the pond gave me a space to collect my thoughts. Once I got bored with the fish, I could stroll through the yard and water the plants while I watched the hummingbirds flutter through the flowers. There was always a new kind of delight to be found in Mrs. Young’s yard.

That’s what Twitter felt like to me in its early days: a perfectly curated feed of everything you love and care enough about to follow throughout the day. But it’s become a place of anxiety, frustration, and hostility for me. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. With a bit of fine-tuning, I’ve traded a feed of hot takes and snarky replies for the same peace of mind I used to get from Mrs. Young’s yard.

Thanks to Twitter’s List feature, you can create little silos of different topics or people, so you’ll only see what you want to, when you want to. I’ve made lists of funny people for a quick pick-me-up, feeds of my friends and fellow reporters, politics (because I have to), and one for all the latest hockey news. It’s a little more work, but keeping everything separate makes sure I never put myself in the wrong mood just by popping onto Twitter.

All you have to do is hop into the Lists tab on the sidebar in your Twitter app, and hit the little button in the bottom right hand corner to create a new list. Just think about the people that you’d like to group together, whether it’s based on what they tweet about or how you’re connected to them, and then just toss a few accounts into each one. It’d be great if you could add hashtags or topics to a list, but this’ll do. Lists can be as long or short as you want, and you can add more people to a list as they come along.

If you’re feeling uninspired, you can even view the lists others have made by viewing their profile. If you have no idea who to follow to keep up with all the latest football scoops, try looking at a list from a sports reporter, and either subscribe to their list, or cherry-pick accounts and add them to your own. Once you’re done, you can start unfollowing people you only turn to from time to time, and your main feed can feel less hostile and more homey. Just don’t be surprised if you get a few spite-unfollows along the way.

In the news

What if Instagram Got Rid of Likes?: There’s been a lot of talk lately about how metrics (likes, retweets, comments, etc.) affect our mental health and overall well being. Arielle Pardes wrote about this for Wired a few months ago, and concluded that even hiding metrics doesn’t kill the itch to get the validation that comes from people giving you some props. John Herrman’s point, is that whether metrics are shown to us, companies are using them to shape our entire online experience. More than anything, this speaks to how much of what we see online is affected by our habits. If you want a change in your feed, you’ll have to start liking different kinds of posts, following different people, and being more critical what you’re using social media for.

A parent's guide to raising a good digital citizen: Depending on who you ask, the internet can be good, bad, fun, miserable, or anywhere in-between. Those of us who grew up alongside it didn’t have a rulebook to follow on how to make being online useful, safe, and good. This is a nice guide on how to make the internet better, and even just fine-tune our own habits to clean up our acts.

Something Nice

Reading List: I used to track my overwhelmingly long reading list in Airtable (editor’s note: this is weird!!), but having to type in all the information manually can get tedious when you want to bulk-add every book in a list of summer reads. Reading List lets me quickly search a database of books and automatically adds them to my list of books to read. The best part is that I can export it as a .csv spreadsheet file and load it into Google Sheets or Airtable if this app loses support or stops working. I’m not sure if it’ll make me a more diligent reader, but it’s a nice companion in my quest to try.

As always, if you have any questions, feedback, or just want to say hello, feel free to drop me a line on Twitter.

My thanks to Daniel Varghese for editing this issue.