My relationship with social media in general and Twitter, in particular, has been a recurring topic on this blog. I like discovering people and stuff through my news feeds, but a lot of the time, they are just a big timesink that drives FOMO and keeps me from doing other things.

According to RescueTime (⇠ referral link), I spent nearly 30 hours on websites in the Social Networking category last month, with around 22 hours dedicated to Twitter alone. (If you feel the total number isn’t too high, consider that it’s only desktop usage during working hours and doesn’t include using the phone under the blanket.)

Facebook, on the other hand, accounts for less than an hour. You could argue that the people and topics on Facebook are just dull, but the primary reason is that I’m no longer reading the news feed. I log in to Facebook only to see my notifications or directly interact with people. To facilitate that, I use a Firefox add-on called “Disable Facebook News Feed”, a minimalist tool that takes the feed out.

There was no similar add-on for Twitter, so I created one for myself. I had used the Facebook add-on for inspiration, but Twitter’s latest redesign doesn’t allow a simple CSS rule for feed removal. So I had to do something more sophisticated; if you’re interested in the solution, see the source on GitHub.

If you are curious about trying this add-on, you can get “Disable Twitter Feed” from the Firefox add-on directory. I marked it as experimental as it’s an early version that probably needs some fixes and improvements. Let me know what you think about it. If there’s sufficient demand, I’ll look into testing and submit it to other browsers, too.

To all the people that I follow on Twitter: I still love you! Feel free to tag me in conversations or DM me, and I’ll probably see it. At the moment, however, I have to prioritize my sanity and productivity over your great thoughts and interesting links.