From microblogging to blogging

My relationship with Twitter and why it's the right time to cut it off, 1

I can’t remember a stretch of days when I didn’t log into Twitter. Ever since I created an account, back in 2012, I have logged in daily. It’s strange, no matter the circumstances in life, the little bird has remained a constant in my life for nearly 10 years. Lately, though, I have been realizing that Twitter has become a pretty significant time sink for my day-to-day. Screen time from just last week:

1. Twitter: 14h 32m

2. Netflix: 9h 2m

3. YouTube: 3h 58m

It’s pretty apparent that this might be unhealthy for me. I’m unsure why I have this feeling of ‘fatigue’ from the platform now, but this lingering feeling has been there for about a month. However, what really catalyzed the process of me questioning my use of Twitter was this post I found on Hacker News. The author talks about their process of deleting their social feeds, and the experience after. I’m not a huge user of Facebook or Instagram, so my only real feed was the Twitter timeline. Having that post to benchmark my experience against will be extremely useful as I start getting away from Twitter.

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With that preface, I want to first talk through why I spent so long on the platform, and my sense of attachment to it. It kind of started in the latter years of high school, where I fell into this niche (at the time) community. I don’t want to reveal too much since it’s my intention to keep this anonymous on purpose, but that community gave me a sense of belongingness. During my college days, I even found a work opportunity as a result of connections in this community! And so if I ever thought about leaving Twitter, I would circle back to this incident and say “you never know what other opportunity can come your way”.

Another major reason why I open this app so frequently is because I enjoy the feeling of watching a live sporting event and getting to live the spectacle through my timeline. Perhaps this feeling has been accentuated during this pandemic, when I’m unable to really go out and watch these events with real people. But during this ~off-season, I’m feeling the burn-out after hours upon hours of watching sports and keeping up with my timeline simultaneously.

My last reason was because tweeting is so simple! A tweet is just a fleeting thought that you can send, and engage with people through, it’s the most raw form of blogging (microblogging), in my opinion. And this accessibility and relative low cost of blogging makes it really easy for one to get hooked.

Typically people get away from Twitter because they have huge followings, and the territory that comes with it is mentally challenging. Add to that the abuse one receives, and it’s nearly impossible to have a consistently positive experience. Humans naturally value things more heavily in the negative domain, so getting abuse sits deeper than the equivalent amount of positive feedback. This ultimately leads people with large followings to leave the platform, and this is generalizable easily to other platforms and not just our bird. But this is not my case, I have a very small following for this to be applicable in my situation.

Also, I’m not a person who believes in hyper-productivity. So me leaving isn’t motivated by the idea that I’ll take this time away from Twitter and invest it into the proverbial rat race. Being on Twitter just isn’t fun anymore. Thus, this is motivated by me wanting some of this time back and diversifying the way I use my downtime. Be it reading books, writing, watching films, or just sleeping. My hypothesis is that this will result in more fulfilling experiences. Instead of hearing or reading about what people have done, and scrolling past it, I hope I will do things myself.

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In the middle of 2020, there was a moment where I wanted to delete my account for good. While that moment and feeling has passed, I still don’t know how to close this off. I don’t intend on leaving Twitter for good, as I’m sure there’ll be a time when I’ll come back to it. But you know, distance makes the heart grow fonder, and I want this distance.

I can definitely try and change my Twitter experience, alter my feed, and make it so that I enjoy it again, but for now at least I don’t think that’s a worthwhile investment. I will likely just go back into the same circles as before, simply because of familiarity and continuation.

So, the question stands: how do I get appropriate closure? I want to tie a knot on this near decade relationship, cleanly. I can remove all my followers and followings, and lock my account for good. I can maybe delete all my tweets, nuke all my likes and retweets, and delete everyone on it. But all these feel very drastic. Twitter has documented such a big part of my life, it would feel unfair to just get rid of it. I suppose there's no way to tie a knot on it perfectly, but recently I've realized that not all relationships end off with the closure that we seek from them.

A fitting frame, from Attack on Titan