I joined Twitter in the spring of 2009 and immediately began grooming a set of programmers to follow. These were, in equal measure, interesting people I’ve worked with, famous open source developers, and random interesting folks who tweeted about programming. I really loved it. As a recluse who has no friends IRL, I found Twitter to be my one respite from extreme social isolation.
It all changed when Trump announced his candidacy for president. As a staunchly apolitical person, I found it painful to watch my corner of Twitter lose its mind. Formerly engaging and technically curious folks reverted to feverishly decrying each new political development and news story. Outrage became a badge of honor among techies.
I did what I’ve always done before: fell back on curation as a means of keeping order. At first I shunted specific individuals into a separate Twitter list. This worked for a while until it turned out that each visit to the “special” list caused me aggravation and disgust. After a few more attempts at re-shuffling my follows, I gave up and unfollowed everyone, renamed my account, and deleted the mobile app.
That was in late 2015. I haven’t looked back since then, although in the early weeks of my Twitter abstinence I found it difficult to keep away. But I persevered and never came back.
I believe I’m better off. I still have no IRL friends, and there isn’t a social platform on which I’m active. This may not be ideal, but it’s better than watching supposedly intelligent people descend into madness. I won’t have any part of that.
You shouldn't discount people as 'descending into madness'.
There is a genuine reason why they feel the way they do.
We are at a critical point in world history whereby the global monetary system is deteriorating and the monetary policies which are currently in place are making life extremely easy for some people and extremely difficult for others.
This bifurcation of society is an expected result of that.
If you don't feel that there are any problems in society, then you're probably on the 'easy side' because believe me, it's unmistakable when you find yourself on the 'hard side'; things change very quickly.
It kind of feels like big companies are using big data to shape people's online experience in radical ways. I literally went from getting tons of upvotes everywhere I posted to getting only downvotes.
The content I produce is pretty much the same as it always was but it feels like the online algorithms must have put me in the 'contrarian' bucket and started manipulating my online experience in a negative way.
Also it's frustrating career-wise because I became much better as a developer over time but I'm getting less attention than I ever did. It also became impossible to get any funding nowadays; you literally feel like a social pariah even though you never did anything wrong.
It all changed when Trump announced his candidacy for president. As a staunchly apolitical person, I found it painful to watch my corner of Twitter lose its mind. Formerly engaging and technically curious folks reverted to feverishly decrying each new political development and news story. Outrage became a badge of honor among techies.
I did what I’ve always done before: fell back on curation as a means of keeping order. At first I shunted specific individuals into a separate Twitter list. This worked for a while until it turned out that each visit to the “special” list caused me aggravation and disgust. After a few more attempts at re-shuffling my follows, I gave up and unfollowed everyone, renamed my account, and deleted the mobile app.
That was in late 2015. I haven’t looked back since then, although in the early weeks of my Twitter abstinence I found it difficult to keep away. But I persevered and never came back.
I believe I’m better off. I still have no IRL friends, and there isn’t a social platform on which I’m active. This may not be ideal, but it’s better than watching supposedly intelligent people descend into madness. I won’t have any part of that.