Of no particular importance

This past Saturday was my 14th Twitterversary: I joined Twitter on April 24, 2007. Back then, I was going to use it mainly as a way to promote my podcast, but then I started using it more and more—until I didn’t. Now, I hardly even check it, let alone Tweet anything.

I saw the graphic at left by chance, displayed at the top of my Twitter feed when I signed in using my desktop browser yesterday morning—and I don’t even remember why I went to the site. When I saw the graphic, I was kind of surprised I’d forgotten about it. I forgot it last year, too, but I was a bit busy at the time: We were about to leave the Covid-19 lockdown. That, and I was still adjusting to my new life. The last time I mentioned a Twitterversary was 2019, before my life was blown up.

The hard, cold reality is that I just don’t care about Twitter anymore. I once had interesting discussions on it, and often found topics to blog about. But as time went on, it became more and more of a cesspool, so much so that every time I went on it I ended up blocking accounts—sometimes dozens at a time. It wasn’t because I thought we’d ever encounter each other, it was simply that I didn’t want to see their aggressive stupidity in my Twitter feed. By me saying that, one might assume the blocked accounts were all Righwing (or pretending to be), and mostly they were, however, I also blocked lots of accounts that were Leftwing (or pretending to be). I was actually blocking extremism, not ideology.

But why go someplace where every time I visited I had to take out the trash? Yeah, nah, just not worth it. The truth is, I often feel that way about Facebook, too, but far less often (I’ve also blocked dozens of accounts there, too, but at a far slower rate than I have on Twitter).

Mainly, I concentrate on people I actually know, or accounts I’m actually interested in. These days, I generally won’t take a chance on a random person, but the worse thing is, I don’t even care about that anymore.

So I forgot all about my Twitterversary—big deal. Chances are good I’ll forget about it next year, too. Times have definitely changed.

My Facebook-a-versary is in a few weeks. I wonder if I’ll remember that… (Spoiler alert: probably not). That’s fine, too.