I have deactivated my Twitter account, as of last night. I hadn’t posted since 2019 and had only done one response to someone else since then. I hadn’t really tweeted with any regularity since 2016. Even at my most tweety I never really was much of a part of the community. I only was still logging in because Twitter stopped allowing me to view anything but direct tweet links without doing so.
The community is no longer what it was. I feel like I’m getting less and less out of it, having to read through more and more chaff to find useful or interesting info. It’s gone more and more toward a particular political persuasion and any posts against that get a pile on of replies attacking them, most of them just garbage repeating things over and over again, which have to be read through to find the few that have substance. Twitter has gone more and more troll and outrage engagement heavy.
To add to all that, they just released a new terms that didn’t seem that great. Soon, the billionaire owner will be working for the government. Social media easily becomes a time suck and melts brains. All in all, it seemed like it was time to just get rid of it entirely. I might’ve liked to leave my posts up for anyone looking back, but they don’t have a “deactivate but leave my stuff up” option. Leaving it would be one more account to be hacked, one more terms I’d be implied to have agreed to even without using the service, and I just want to minimize the “things” in my life.
Many of the people I followed on there had left already, but a few people that I knew in real life, such as @sadukie, and @teejcodes still post on there and I will miss getting updates on them. Most others I should be able to find elsewhere.
I did the export of my data before leaving. It took 24 hours in spite of my limited amount of data. The data is all in a JS monstrosity with lots of JSON-like objects. I will try to extract it and put anything that seems important somewhere on my website. I’m sure that will take me a long time though.
I’ll leave you with a bit of the current Twitter response feel:
- lol cry more
- and then the whole classroom clapped
- I’ll take things that didn’t happen for $500, Alex [I don’t think they’ve watched Jeopardy in a while]
- …retarded…
- …libtard…
- …commie…
- …whore…