I used to use Twitter. I stopped, because it didn't fit in my life anymore. I have a fixed amount of attention every day, and more critical things use almost all of it. None of my friends use Twitter anymore, and news aggregators bring me up-to-date in much less time than my tweet feed.
I quit Twitter on March 20th and it was the best thing I’ve done in a long, long time.
The funny thing was that it starts sending you random notifications from people you don’t even follow or have the bell on for as a dark pattern to get you to come back.
What I realized is — like how I quit reading the news many years ago — everything on Twitter is pointless and ephemeral.
From one outrage cycle to the next, never relenting. Everyone always mad about some meaningless minutiae. If it was actually important it would surface by some other means so I never missed anything.
Then I’d go outside and everyone’s living their lives like Twitter doesn’t exist.
It’s easier to do than you think. Lock your account, turn off notifications for the whole app, and do literally anything else.
I used to be addicted to Twitter, checking it 10+ times a day at the very least. Now the content I get is awful, and I only end up there whenever I follow someone else's link :/
I quit twitter years ago, too - but every other social media platform is filled with screenshots of the very worst of twitter, pretty much all the time. You can quit all you like, but Twitter is inescapable.
This resonates with me. Twitter was my compulsion, until I realised what an absolute time sink it had become, whilst equally becoming an increasingly inane and frustrating experience. I logged out and never went back (almost 2 years has passed I think) without the slightest inclination to return.
This. I've quit using Twitter (and almost every other social media platform afterwards except Instagram which is basically my portfolio) and my level of frustration went down by an order of magnitude since then.
I have partially removed all my social networks except Twitter. I want to find out about things in real time, and from various sources, therefore Twitter is still a valid medium for this purpose. Although I interact little in the discussions.
Leaving Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and other networks gave me automatic anxiety relief. I no longer care what anyone close to me thinks and I don't get into discussions with close relatives.
My life as a conservative is much better without social networks where they censor me non-stop, just Twitter and being very careful with what I write and how I write it I can more or less start conversations. Sooner or later I will leave Twitter too, it is a matter of finding another social network, free and open and nurtured by people.
First, there was LiveJournal. Then there was MySpace. Then there was FaceBook. I was on FaceBook until .edu stopped being a requirement. Shortly after that change, my wall became a mix of soft porn and hightimes. Nothing wrong with that, but it isn’t what I want to see so I deleted my FaceBook account. I went over to Twitter. Over time, Twitter ceased to be interesting as it turned into people affirming their positions on things they usually didn’t understand very well. I deleted my Twitter account half a decade ago. All of it is actually useless, and it does nothing but eat time.
I left about 6 years ago. I became increasingly frustrated that nobody was talking about real issues, namely politics, and that celebrities weren’t using their vast reach to amplify messages. Twitter was for tweeting what one had for lunch.
Well, look at Twitter now. I got what I wanted, and I hate it. I was wrong. I’d happily go back to early Twitter.
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