Goodbye Twitter

I’m going to take a Twitter break, maybe permanently. I would normally Irish exit, but I wanted to write down some of my thoughts since Twitter has been a large part of my life over the last ten years.

I joined Twitter in March of 2008 while doing some homework for my “Object Oriented Programming in Java” course. Twitter was (of course) smaller back then. We often participated in “Follow Fridays” where we suggested interesting people to follow. We regularly encountered the Fail Whale. We tweeted all-lowercase status updates, standardized retweets and @mentions, and fought over which link shortener to use. I made tons of friends, many of whom I went on to meet in person, and some I have yet to.

I remember those days fondly, but lately I’ve found myself spending far too much time and attention scrolling through updates that I largely don’t care about. Retweets, quote tweets, memes, hot takes. (And yes, I know I’m likely guilty of polluting your feeds with the same.) The signal-to-noise ratio of my feed has deteriorated to a point where it’s no longer worth the time and attention I was giving it.

As a replacement, I’m hoping to spend more time reading and writing longer-form content.

👋