I have noticed something recently, and I think it explains why Twitter is at once ubiquitously known as "hellsite", and why people keep coming back to it.

Or, at least, why I do.

In short, there's two broad categories of interactions I have on Hellsite.

Type one is "Twitter as a news service." News from the world around me, usually from people I've never met, heard of, or interacted with. This can be anything from footage of a riot to a hot take about a recent headline.

This is valuable, in the "keeping informed" sense, and, frankly, even with the high noise floor inherent in social media, it's orders of magnitude better than mainstream news, but it is usually unpleasant. 2020 has been a year, and the 20s will likely be a decade of the same.

So, getting news or the latest hot take about how Outgroup aren't *really* people and really ought to be walled at the earliest opportunity is -- unsurprisingly -- deeply unpleasant. This being slathered on top of an already tremendously hard year is just insult to injury.

However, this brings us to Type Two, which is interacting with people that I know personally, would (or have!) met in person, and consider friends. Here, even if the news is unpleasant, the interaction is meaningful.

Listening to a friend vent about a hard day at work is providing tangible help to someone you care about.

*this* part of Twitter is, unequivocally, wonderful. It's social media at its best, it brings people closer together, and it makes a community out of a pile of TCP sockets.

The trouble is, making friends online is a skill everybody has to, by necessity, figure out how to do on their own, just because their culture, social context, social skills, interests, and quirks are always unique enough that each case has to be considered one at a time.

The ground rules for Tango peeps are starkly different than the ground rules for FP peeps, and both are likewise starkly unique as compared to IDW wonks or Systems/Ops-y people or SciFi/Fantasy or gun nuts or... what-have-you.

In addition, you have all of the usual social predation problems of people figuring themselves out, looking to get ahead, not being aware of their blind spots or being able to manage their limbic system short-circuiting their higher reasoning.

And don't even get me started on how hyper-polarized things _in general_ have gotten. Finding genuine connection is impossible if we're all reflexively hip-checking each other to see if we're on Team Red/Team Blue, or any of the other myriad Identity fractures floating around.

But, my advice is, simply, to lean as hard as you can into Type Two Twitter. Don't get rid of Type One -- putting yourself in a bubble does you no favours, and we all will need to be vigilant and informed to weather the coming decade...

...but. Schedule time to spend with friends and loved ones. It'll pay off.