Twitter these days

In January, 2018 I wrote this:

Yet, I continue to learn, discover, laugh, share, and interact with interesting and generally wonderful people on Twitter every day.

At that time, I decided to continue using Twitter, but I’d significantly pruned back my feed. Disabling retweets, unfollowing negative people, unfollowing brands, all made Twitter more useful than not.

However, I’m not so sure I can continue spending time on Twitter.

I try to keep things tidy. I try to follow carefully and unfollow quickly. I disable retweets. I avoid trending topics. And yet, After 20 minutes I’m often disgusted, angry, or both.

The current situation(s) in the world and the divisive nature of things makes it difficult to avoid conflict, and I have learned to deal with it. What I can’t stand, though, is that so many (most?) tweets are people jumping up and down, pointing, and yelling, “That’s BAD!!!”. Doesn’t matter if it’s about tech, politics, art, music, or anything else. The tone is so often one of smug superiority and outrage and, I’ve gotta say, it makes one weary. This has always been present, but it hasn’t always been so overwhelmingly prevalent. It’s depressing and exhausting.

This is not me putting my head in the sand in order to avoid difficult topics. I just prefer other methods of learning about them and finding ways to be involved other than drive-by “How dare you!” posts on social media.

It’s a shame that it’s come to this, because, as Om Malik wrote:

The random acts of kindness that made Internet so beautiful and magical still exist.

They’ve just gotten so hard to find that the search may not be worth the trouble.