https://joebush.net/2022/03/27/to-the-twitter-end/
I recognize that this probably resembles the intermittent posts on the “Forum Discussion” board of someone saying like “I have a problem, I look at the YouTube Poop Forums way too much and I get too emotionally invested when I’m here so I am retiring from the forums” and then they’d leave for like five days and come back instead of just gradually fading away like you’re supposed to.
But the account is no longer there, you can check for yourself. It was melancholic, deleting it - I had that account for twelve years! But time and life moves on. As it stands, I think that my career at least for the foreseeable future will not require me to use and will not benefit from me using Twitter. That was the last thing keeping me on there, the idea that if I went on to have a creative writing career, it’d benefit me to have a presence to share that stuff to. That’s not what I’m working towards anymore (though I still do creative work, as you could judge from what I put on this Substack page here) and I don’t really aspire to that on a career-level anymore, at least not at the moment.
I have had to remind myself that I do not have to use social media. None of us have to. It is a decision to use it. If it leaves you frustrated or angry more than it doesn’t, it is worth reconsidering whether you really want or need to be there.
There is a good book about this, which partially inspired my move away from using social media at all in late-2020, Jaron Lanier’s “10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Right Now”. I don’t agree with all of it, but he puts forward an idea that these sites make money off of the users’ activity, and as long as there’s a strong, active userbase that they’re making money from, they can keep being more exploitative, and by continuing to use a social media site that frustrates me, I was feeding into and worsening my own frustration.
And Twitter is worse than it was, isn’t it? At some point it became worse than it used to be. I don’t think that I’m the only one who has noticed that. It didn’t always thrust so much that you didn’t ask for in front of your face, and it didn’t always have that quote tweet function, where everyone can hold something up in front of your face and yell “doesn’t this suck, isn’t this horrible?”, and the trending tab used to actually be what strings of text were trending, not a collection of news headlines that the site’s algorithm has determined will frustrate you and keep you reading.
Regardless, it is not something I will deal with anymore.
And we move on!