Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Reducing Twitter Usage
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2016 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
I just posted this on Twitter:
I'm feeling bleh about Twitter recently. http://www.listen-tome.com/wasted-hours/
It's a closed-source platform. Recently time-to-load feels slower and navigation feels more unwieldy.
The speech I want to perform and experience doesn't fit in tweets or Twitter conversations/threads.
I want less glibocracy and more vulnerability, exploration, play, context, slow reflection.
The ads get under my skin, but so do the templated speech acts; we become headline writers.
In the attention economy, Twitter is an attractive casino; the house always wins, though.
Many of the reasons I don't use Facebook https://www.harihareswara.net/sumana/2010/10/19/0 continue to apply to Twitter, even more post-Snowden.
Twitter bots are great art! https://points.datasociety.net/bots-a-definition-and-some-historical-threads-47738c8ab1ce http://www.crummy.com/writing/speaking/2014-Foolscap/
But I'm here to signal-boost, get news, see friends & promote @ChangesetLLC, not to make art.
So tell me your blog's RSS feed (I use Dreamwidth https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faq#othersites ) or podcast/newsletter, so I can subscribe.
I'm reducing the # of accounts I follow; I want to spend less time in the thoroughly surveilled casino.
We don't have robust etiquette here to use; I may hurt feelings. Sorry.
And blogs are great, so instead of Storifying, here's the text of what I've just said: [link to this very blog post]
