Quitting Twitter

I quit Twitter about 6 months ago. It was eerily similar to quitting smoking (which I did a couple years ago). Honestly, that scared me straight. The fact that an app on my phone had similar addictive qualities to tobacco was alarming enough to keep me off. I still get the urge to log back in sometimes, but luckily I perma-nuked the account so I’d be starting from scratch, which is a large enough barrier to keep me from trying (for now).

who cares ?

You should create a new blog category, containing only posts with titles up to 280 characters and just post the tidbits you'd otherwise post to Twitter. Styled accordingly.

If worthy enough, you could even share the link to any one of them on Twitter. ;)

For a post called "Quitting Twitter", I think this piece actually does a great job summarizing the really cool things about Twitter. I think there's something a little magical about finding someone you really respect in your field, responding to one of their tweets, and getting a thoughtful response six minutes later!

The toxicity is rough, though. It exhausts me on big subreddits, too -- it's impossible to have conversations with anyone because the focus is on "dunking" people for the benefit of other readers. Like anything else reddit, it gets better the smaller you go.

I find this is actually true on Twitter, too. I've had some positive interactions in the replies under a @patio11 tweet with 120 likes. But any moderately popular tweet is just a shitshow.

Twitter (and Reddit, and HN, etc.) are sort of pretending to be conversation-software, when really, they're tiny blogs; by and large, you don't write replies for the benefit of the person to whom you're responding, you write them for all the people who you know are going to see your reply. That's the source of so much of the toxic feeling, IMO, but it's also the entire value propositon: come see the interesting (or funny, or infuriating, or horrifying) back-and-forth of internet strangers!

Maybe the toxicity can be eliminated or mitigated somehow, but I really think it's part-and-parcel with the format of "public conversation."

God knows I'm part of the problem; I write between 1 and 10 HN/reddit comments every day. It's an addiction! External validation feels very, very good. I try not to "dunk" people, but if there's one thing the internet has, it's no shortage of idiotic comments, and it's hard for me not to take a condescending tone when someone's talking about how women don't deserve to play videogames or how Joe Biden wants to eat babies or whatever.

I guess the best you can hope for is a community spirit that encourages thoughtful conversation and discourages shit-talking. And I think that's where Twitter, by and large, really fails. Twitter culture at large is so, so based around "look at this dumb shit this idiot said! aren't they stupid?" It sucks, and it absolutely warps people like the author says.

Who needs twitter anyway? Right? We have hacker news :)