We just returned from a two-week bike trip on the Oregon coast (which we'll be posting about on https://www.jenzach.us pretty soon), and during the trip, I took a vacation from email and Twitter. I've gone back to email, but I've decided that my life is better without Twitter, so I'm going to stop looking at other people's tweets, and also stop posting my own tweets at both my personal (@HodgBlog) and business (@poplarware) accounts. I am not going to close my Twitter accounts right now, in case I change my mind, but I may do that in the future.
Here are some of the factors that went into this decision:
- It takes a lot of time each day to keep up with the people I have been following on Twitter, even though I don't follow a huge number of accounts.
- Even though most of the accounts I follow are people I know personally (a few are organizations I'm interested in), the vast majority of the tweets they make are not of interest to me, so most of that time is spent sifting through things I'm not interested in.
- Twitter is a for-profit company, so their objective is to profit off my use of their service. I do not really want to contribute to their profits.
- I think it is sad that in many open-source projects (such as the Drupal project that I contribute to), Twitter, Slack, and other for-profit services are primary means of communication. I do not really want to be part of that trend.
- I don't think that Twitter is fair and balanced in its enforcement of its own content policies (harassment, hate content, etc.).
- President Donald Trump makes extensive use of Twitter, and most of what he tweets is either false or misleading. I don't really want to be part of that platform.
So... if you want to contact me, don't use Twitter. Thanks!