I wiped my Twitter account. I haven’t checked Twitter since late 2024, but really the decision was made by early 2023 and has been inevitable since 2015.
If you’re tuned in you can probably correlate those dates with specific events but going into detail about why I quit would be like airing grievances at a funeral. That’s old news. Instead I’m thinking about why used it for as long as I did. Over my (oh dear) almost 15 years on the platform, Twitter has been an online social space, a personal newsletter, a promotional platform, a news hub, and a place to connect with niche subcultures. It was, for better or for worse, a significant part of my life. I hate that, but I can’t deny it either.
I used Twitter for so long that I scroll down my feed to the very beginning, the person I find there isn’t me. I don’t recognize my own voice until 2017 (the year I started devoting myself to movies in an attempt to overcorrect for a lifetime addiction to video games… but that’s a different blog post). This person from 2011 sure was invested in NASA and… Humble Bundle, apparently. What a dork.
I also barely recognize a whole lot of the names I was replying to, often in lengthy back-and-forth chains. It feels like flipping through a high school yearbook. I wonder where they are now and if they remember me. That’s why I decided to wipe my account’s feed but keep the account present. If any of them start wondering the same thing about me, they’ll still find a signpost pointing them here. Hello! Message me on Bluesky!
Clearly, I am a sentimental sap. As such, when the moment came, I couldn’t actually delete the data. I don’t know if it’s nostalgia or if I’m just too high on my own supply, but I liked having that record of jokes and quips and hot takes and tiny delusions. So, before running the shredder, I exported my data and converted it to a readable archive, which I have uploaded here.
I don’t recommend reading the archive. It’s not enjoyable, I promise. It mostly consists of retweets about things I used to care about and replies to my friends where the context has been lost. I also had a policy of sweeping my history of anything particularly embarrassing every few years, so it’s hardly complete. I just feel marginally better knowing that if, for some impossible reason, I needed to retrieve that data, it’s there. And now that data lives somewhere that belongs to me. As sentimental as I am, I’m equally possessive.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the digital platforms we entwine ourselves in, what we give them and what we get back. The key question for me is this: Is the value I’m extracting from this platform appropriate relative to the value I’m creating for the platform’s owners by using it? In order words, if I am the product, as the big tech critics say, am I getting a fair deal?
Twelve years ago, that answer was easily “yes.” From 2012 to around 2016 I was deeply entrenched in the speedrunning scene, a subculture that effectively took place on Twitter. Announcing streams, celebrating PBs, and promoting your sub-community were essential parts of a speedrunning “career.” Even before that, Twitter was my main point of communication with like-minded people I had met online. It fed a social urge.
Then, starting in the latter half of the 2010s, I would close the app feeling not satisfied but fatigued. Sometimes even angry, and not an energizing anger but a poisonous useless anger. I tried a few mitigation methods, including setting time limits and following dozens and dozens of artists to flush the politics off my feed, but there was no solution. The good times were over. I’m increasingly of the opinion that the human brain simply isn’t capable of safely handling social media. So I tapped out. I immediately discovered that with so much mental energy freed from the unsolicited opinions of strangers I could redirect it in much more fulfilling directions.
I’ll stop myself from issuing a blanket recommendation that everyone quit social media. I still believe it’s generally possible to get out of social media what you want to, assuming it’s there to be found. That said, I’m specifically suspicious of the active maliciousness of Twitter and TikTok. If you’re still on those I’d suggest cutting it out of your life entirely if possible, or, if you do need to use it for whatever reason (self-promotion, work, etc.), at least scale usage back to the bare minimum. Tell Twitter “thank you” and move on. You deserve better.