
I Quit Twitter and It Feels Great - abhiminator
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/01/opinion/quitting-twitter-lindy-west.html
======
haberman
> You can call me oversensitive, but the truth is I got far better than any
> human being should be at absorbing astonishing cruelty and feeling nothing.

> Well, here’s what my new life is like: I don’t wake up with a pit in my
> stomach every day, dreading what horrors accrued in my phone overnight. I
> don’t get dragged into protracted, bad-faith arguments with teenage boys
> about whether poor people deserve medical care, or whether putting nice guys
> in the friend zone is a hate crime.

> I’m better equipped to fight for global culture change now that I’m not
> locked in eternal whack-a-mole with a sea of angry boy-men, an unknown
> percentage of which are probably robots.

It's amazing to me how a person can complain about toxic behavior and and then
respond with their own belittling counterpunch. There are plenty of people who
manage to be civil on Twitter despite all of the bile. If you choose to be
caustic yourself, then you are just like the people you criticize, you're just
doing it from a different political viewpoint (excepting the people who make
actual threats of course, which is a different thing entirely).

~~~
specialp
If you are going to post constantly about political and social issues, and be
a NYT columnist about such issues, you are going to get counter points of
varying quality. Some may be offensive. Twitter is a 2 way platform.
Qualifying opposition viewpoints as bots, teenage boys, and angry man-boys
doesn't help, and shows in a way that the writer is as hard headed as them. I
am sure some of them are in that category, but Twitter bans people for
outright threatening actions.

I use Twitter to follow people that are in the software field or that I am
otherwise interested in. I don't post non stop about social or political
issues, and I don't follow anyone that does. I agree that it is a stressful
and caustic environment, but you can't expect to be in it and not get the side
effects.

She can go back to speaking to sympathetic people and disconnect from real
feedback. That is just going to put her in a silo. Facebook does that to
people by only offering "likes", calling your followers your "friends" and
presenting all news you like. Twitter is the real world albeit more caustic as
people are pseudo-anonymous.

------
cs702
Over the past year or so, I have noticed these sort of "I quit social media"
pieces popping up with increasing frequency in a growing number of websites,
including HN.

At first, the pieces were highly personal blog posts by technologists and
other early-adopter types who dared question whether social media was good for
them, and concluded the answer was no. Now, the pieces are by op-ed writers
whose columns appear regularly in major newspapers like the NY Times.

Meanwhile, FaceBook just announced that daily active users dropped by 1
million in the US and Canada -- the first drop ever.[a]

All of this is making me wonder if what we are seeing is the beginning of a
wave of _dis-adoption_ of social media.

[a] [https://www.recode.net/2018/1/31/16957122/facebook-daily-
act...](https://www.recode.net/2018/1/31/16957122/facebook-daily-active-user-
decline-us-canda-q4-earnings-2018)

\--

Edit: I just noticed someone flagged the OP. While I can understand why, I'm
not sure I agree with the flagging. The OP may be indicative of a potentially
important, larger trend.

------
simonsarris
> Being on Twitter felt like being in a nonconsensual BDSM relationship with
> the apocalypse. So, I left.

She followed shitty people.

Fellas I recommend the opposite: Quit Facebook and Instagram and start using
Twitter.

I used to not use twitter until I started listening to more audiobooks and
podcasts from economists. I realized that, living in semi-rural New Hampshire
and several years out of college, its been a long time since I was able to
surround myself with lots of really intelligent people.

I hopped on twitter and unfollowed nigh EVERYONE. All the joke tweeters, all
the depressives, all the political whiners, and started following several
people I thought were really smart. Then I followed several more who posted
things I disagreed with, for good measure. I spent 2017 liberally following
and unfollowing people until I liked the mix.

Then I did the opposite of this lady: I largely stopped using Facebook and
Instagram, and only really look at Twitter.

Since the 280 char change, its loads better than other social networks.
Interesting discussions, the ability to interact with far-away intellectuals.
New avenues of curiosity and gratification and inspiration. Too many memes or
political sobbing? Unfollow!

Facebook (which I loved 6 years ago) has devolved into a mess of acquaintances
who share articles without actually reading them and posting idiotic memes and
other low-effort content. Instagram is nice for seeing what my friends are
actually doing with their lives, but the ego-ness of it can get to you.

Twitter is the only social network that still offers a lot of intellectual
gratification, and even more so since the 280 char change, and I am super
grateful for that.

------
danso
It truly sucks that the author faced the kind of harassment that made her shut
down her account. But it does sound like time away from social media will be a
good thing. I use Twitter daily. I don't understand why the people most upset
by Trump are often the same ones who follow him and even tell Twitter to push
tweets by him to their mobile notifications.

It goes beyond masochism, there's a bit of self-importance, as if seeing his
Tweet as it happens in real time makes you any more informed about
presidential affairs or prepared for the apocalypse. No, you're as helpless
and ineffectual as anyone else who doesn't have a direct line to Trump, so why
pretend that you need to get a real-time feed of his BS when it's just
something that robs your attention and happiness?

I work in the media and am expected to stay informed of current events.
"Trump" is on my list of terms to ban from my timeline. I still get plenty of
news about him and his tweets when I visit the NYT or Wapo home pages, and I
feel no disadvantage to reading about his Tweet outbursts a day later.

I think the author was right to delete her account for all the pain Twitter
gave her. But, despite the headline about feeling great, it doesn't sound like
she's quite over Twitter. It wasn't clear to me why she didn't try a period of
time in which she set her account to private, which would still allow her to
stay in touch with her friends while being mostly unreachable by trolls.

------
VonGuard
Twitter is experiencing something of a resurgence these days, with user
numbers growing since Trump. Basically, Twitter managed to squeeze growth out
of its decision not to censor bigots, stalkers, and outright maniacs. Now
they're reaping rewards for that decision.

~~~
realPubkey
I must admit that I like twitter for exactly that openness. The freedom of
shitposting better represents the real world then any facebook-"funny"-video
could do.

~~~
reaperducer
> The freedom of shitposting better represents the real world

Man, I hope I never have to live where you do.

------
peatmoss
I probably agree with the author of this piece on many things, but this
article felt a whole lot like the shouting that drove me off Twitter about the
same time she left.

I was never the target of right-wing trolls, but I did see many people in my
Twitter-sphere tweet non-stop about it with such vitriol that I’m not sure I
was getting less aggregate exposure.

I think the problem is that Twitter is a platform for evolutionary selection
of slogan-based-dialog. I kind of imagine two armies standing across a
battlefield from one another carefully deciding which volley of pithy digs to
throw at one another.

This article feels like a rehash of all that—generating, like Twitter, more
heat than light.

------
superquest
Attempting to follow the news in real time is what wears most Twitter users
out.

I felt the same way, but then I unfollowed everyone who tweeted about current
events and the stress is gone.

------
metalliqaz
That's great dude, congrats. Now you can read about what happens on twitter in
the newspaper the next day.

~~~
NiklasMort
You're aware that you don't need a Twitter account to read tweets yea?

------
kthejoker2
Aaaaaalmost to "I don't own a TV" territory...

------
petraeus
I never joined, feels even better

------
monksy
I quit the dating apps and sites. It feels fantastic. Technology has been
terrible about helping with socialization.

------
rubidium
What self important drivel... who is upvoting this and why??

~~~
klez
I didn't upvote, but you should remember the guidelines

* Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

* Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

------
NiklasMort
I never started any social media account, do I get to write an article in the
NYT now? No? No offense but as much as I am pro people quitting their digital
addictions articles like that are getting annoying. #nooffense #duh

~~~
____a
No social media accounts, except this one.

~~~
NiklasMort
an account on HN is as social as a one time visit to AA

~~~
____a
And yet more social than many people's use of Twitter.

~~~
NiklasMort
I'd dispute that HN counts as social media in the classic sense

