I deleted my Twitter account

I deleted my Twitter account about a week ago, but I’ve waited a bit to see if I regretted the decision. There’s a 30-day cooling off period and I didn’t want to write this post, then realise that I’d made a mistake, and recover the account.

But the fact is, I don’t miss it at all. Not only do I not miss it, I feel quite good about it.

This wasn’t a knee-jerk reaction to any single event, and it had nothing to do with the internal politics at Twitter. It was the slow realisation that spending time on Twitter wasn’t a good investment.

I was still getting interesting and useful posts showing up in my feed, but I can find interesting and useful information any time I want. I think that Twitter had become more like entertainment, rather than a network of relationships. And I joined Twitter – and have always used it in this way – to find others with similar interests, and connect with them.

It’s taken a while but it’s been a long time since I’ve felt any kind of connection with anyone on Twitter. The engagement that made it a useful and interesting platform simply doesn’t exist anywhere. The most I could hope for were Likes and Retweets, but those interactions weren’t leading to anything more substantial. So the primary reason I started using Twitter – for connection and interaction – was no longer present.

And even though I was still being presented with interesting and useful information, I don’t have the bandwidth to follow up on all of it.

And that got me thinking about two things:

1. Who do I want to spend more time engaging with, and is Twitter the only place to do that?
2. What evidence do I have that anything I do on Twitter leads to any outcomes that matter to me?

I started to feel that I’d be better served by looking for specific ideas when I need them, for projects I care about, rather than hoping that the Twitter algorithm serves it to me a the right time.

The most creative, innovative, productive, and caring people who are sharing ideas that I find most valuable are doing so in longer-form channels that I can find in other ways. And that means I’m shifting to seek out information because I need it and not simply because it happens to be what shows up in my feed.

It’s an active process that has more friction, which slows me down enough to ask if it’s worth the time. Twitter was just showing me ‘stuff’, and even though, every now and again, I’d come across something valuable (as opposed to interesting), the signal-to-noise ratio of Twitter had become unacceptably high.

Moving forward, I’m going to spend more time writing here on this site, and will share that plan at some point. In the meantime I’ve created a separate stream here for more short-form content that I’d usually share on Twitter. If you’d like to get notifications from me around what I’m reading, thinking, and writing about, you can subscribe to this blog.

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Note: Before deleting my Twitter account, I made a good-faith attempt to see if Mastodon is a viable alternative. For what I’m looking for, it isn’t. So I deleted both my Mastodon accounts as well.