Last night, I deleted the last of my three Twitter / X accounts:
- @garethjms
- @195metalcds
- @seccalendar
Twitter was created in March 2006. I opened my personal Twitter account on 27 January 2008 and closed it on 16 October 2024, a duration of 6,107 days or 16 years, 8 months, 19 days.
However, I have mostly boycotted the platform over the last year, hanging on to see if things would improve. But over the last few weeks, I have felt an increasing urge to simply delete my accounts and move on.
So, this week I downloaded my post archives and deactivated my Twitter accounts.
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in April 2022, I have watched with a certain degree of horror what he has done to both the company and the platform. He sacked a ton of great engineers and dedicated staff, then turned the platform into a cesspool of misinformation amidst his own dictatorial ramblings.
When Musk changed the platform’s name to X, like many I continued to call it Twitter. Sending tweets is much more fun than sending Xs, or posts, or whatever Musk wanted us to call them.
But given the direction the platform was heading, it stopped feeling fun posting anything.
Then some of my friends left the platform and moved elsewhere. Or nowhere, sickened by the whole pervasiveness of social media.
I feel like I am heading somewhere similar myself—a desire to use social media less and interact with the world around me more. This globally connected experiment is tiring.
Early days
The early days of Twitter were fun and hopeful. I sat in amazement as news stories broke first on Twitter, sometimes 30 minutes before they were reported on the BBC News website.
I met a ton of really interesting people on the platform, and some in real life. There was an openness about the API in the early days and I loved the creativity of developers building new Twitter clients, both for Windows and Android.
Eventually, that got locked down and TweetDeck got bought out and became the official client.
And the platform got saturated with bots and celebrities and the early innocence and cheeky fun disappeared in favour of online spats, trolls and misinformation. It didn’t feel fun any more.
I have quite a few social media accounts on various other platforms. This has given me a boost to review those and close down the ones I don’t need.
I am older now, I don’t feel the same urge to microblog what I’m doing 24/7.
(I’m currently writing a blog post.)
Thank you to all the lovely folks I met online and then in the real world.
Twitter, you were fun. I briefly became an X user; now I’m an ex-user.
