I seem to have left the Twitter

Farewell

Sometime last week, and I can’t even remember the day now, I left Twitter. I can’t say exactly why, but it had stopped being fun a long time before—and also stopped being informative, or even interesting.

I joined in 2010 or 2011, by the end of 2011 anyway, I followed about 500 accounts and had about 300 followers. And there was no sorting algorithm at the time: your feed was really just what the people you followed tweeted, in the order they tweeted it. If I read it on my phone throughout the day, I could usually catch up to where I’d left off the night before. I learned how to write tweets of no longer tha 140 characters, and I got to see the fairly eclectic list of accounts I’d chosen to follow, which means I’d get something about science something about politics, some silly joke, something about books or films, something personal someone chose to share. There may have been a bit more politics than that makes it sound, but it was more first among equals, than absolutely dominant. In the last few years (probably before Elon Musk), my feed seems curated and trimmed of anything that wouldn’t produce a reply.

How wonderfully simple it all seems. You replied to people by putting an amsersat in front of their name, at the beginning of a tweet, and you only mentioned them by putting any other character (or concatenation of characters: words to most people) first.

While I think ‘hate’ is greatly overused, Twitter’s algorithms seem to thrive on getting a reaction. I didn’t seem to see tweets by people I was friendly with, while I did see a lot that seemed created to provoke me. And so I spent a lot of time arguing with total strangers. (“Someone is wrong on the internet” isn’t a bad descriptor of my usage.)

Last week, I just gave up. I’d been arguing with someone, and I thought I could have explained my position quite simply—but it just wasn’t worth it. I didn’t care what he thinks. I didn’t know why I was even talking—tweeting, x-ing, whatever—to him.

And I didn’t go back. And I don’t think I ever will.

Sorry, Elon. Good luck with Mars.