7th September 2021 at 16:02

It’s been a while since I’ve posted on this blog. If you’re reading this on Twitter, I’ve gone back to syndicating these articles with IFTTT. It auto-tweets via my RSS feed.

Anyway, Twitter is the subject of today’s article.

A week ago, I decided it was time to go on an extended—potentially permanent—break from Twitter. I did this because friends, I am terminally fed up with not just Twitter: but social media as a whole.

The reason I’m focusing on Twitter today is because I can’t escape it. Let me explain why.

Last weekend was a bank holiday here and we had a lovely few days where my partner’s family came over. Lots of good food and good LOLs were had. The subject of social media came up and me—being a few wines down—went into a full-throttle attack on Facebook and its devastating impact on society.

Long story short: after they learned of Facebook’s genocidal history and the penny dropped about how small rewards for engagement is the game—not “keeping up with family”: my partner’s sister and I decided to deactivate Facebook products in solidarity with each other. I only had an Instagram profile because Facebook itself is long dead to me.

I deactivated Instagram and all that was left…was Twitter. I have two accounts on Twitter: my main—what I call “work” account and a private, mutuals-only account. I opened the latter a few months ago because frankly, I got fed up of fucking reply-guys.

The problem we have here is that the main “work” account can’t be deactivated because the industry I work in decided that Twitter would be integral and I am freelance. Yep: the platform that limits content to 280 characters and actively rewards hot-takes and negative interactions is the bedrock of the tech industry. Yes, there are blogs and people read blogs, but really, it’s all on Twitter. The problem with my private, mutuals only account is that a lot of mutuals work in tech, so that content (through no fault of theirs) follows them into the no-work zone, so the nice LOLs I have on there are constantly tainted with Jon McWanker’s “well, really, the cascade was a mistake” shit-takes.

Ideally, I’d nuke both accounts and deal with the consequences later. The problem is that very rarely, Twitter does bring upon good opportunities. A lot of my work is credited to that Twitter account too, so loads of links would just stop working overnight, which is not cool. So in short: I’m fucking trapped.

What am I going to do then? It’s time to go fully hands-off with Twitter. This is the first step: posting from a third party. Even with Tweetbot muting the living daylights out of almost everything: Twitter is still hell. I just can’t be around it anymore. It’s severely impacting my mental health and as I’ve written before: I’m fucking addicted to it.

What I hate the most is the fucking asinine takes on everything. Lucky for us, Chad McDickhead has strong opinions on CSS frameworks and painfully naive takes on the impact of US Troop withdrawal on Afghanistan. He also thinks that the COVID vaccine is “experimental” and we should all “get back to normal”. Let me tell you dear reader: after losing a loved one recently to COVID, those latter comments hit different.

Anyway, I just thought I’d share what’s going on. You’ll be happy to know that since last week, I feel endlessly happier and also, weirdly burned out. I think I knew a big burnout was coming and luckily, I know the signs to deal with it now. Getting away from Twitter will only help that.

I’ll auto-post from here and my new music recommendation blog and hopefully, that’s all you’ll see from me on Twitter—for a few months, at least. The sad thing is that I like to use my following to give people a leg-up by signal boosting them. If anyone has ideas how I can still do that, let me know.

As always, email is the best way to contact me (hi@piccalil.li), but if you really have to: I will periodically check Twitter DMs using Twizzle.

In closing, I managed to quit smoking—after 15 years—and have a sensible relationship with cigarettes, so I can damn-well do the same with Twitter.

Take it easy.