Less than a minute ago I deactivated my Twitter account.
It will be gone forever in 30 days, apparently.
This brief stream of consciousness account of that decision is intentionally artless because I've got things to do with my day that aren't peering at a screen and snacking on content that will be forgotten by the time I've got my boots on.
Having quit tweeting (but leaving the account up) in 2020 I really felt the benefits of unplugging from the awful echo chamber I'd created.
The broadening of intellectual horizons was immediate. Actively choosing to investigate content in a mindful way, rather than passively because it was skimming past and I didn't want to miss out on the latest hot take, was another level of nourishing.
It led me to investigate alternative perspectives properly for the first time in my life, rather than feel threatened by them.
Twitter, I realised, had been making me lazy and dumb.
Like the lazy and dumb repetition of what's always been wrong with Twitter. Which I'll tell you now.
It isn't that it creates epistemic bubbles and encourages ideological conformity. We can create bubbles just as easily on Substack or by subscribing to our favourite media anywhere. We can write in ways that conform to what we know our readers already think. If that’s what we really want to do. Twitter isn't a special problem for that.
It's that it draws the worst out of its users, which inevitably happens to be the aspects of them that get traction and big profile. Then what's happening is that everyone is lobbing stones all day long at the worst representatives of potentially interesting perspectives.
Having originally leveraged this to what I thought was my advantage I came to dislike Twitter Mike and therefore retired him.
When I started Rarely Certain I began to post these articles on my semi-dormant Twitter, but with a strict rule.
Do not read the timeline and under no circumstances succumb to the trending topics.
A few people from there signed up here, so it was a worthwhile exercise.
Then, about a week ago Substack offered advice to writers on using Twitter properly to promote their writing.
I thought there are still 18,000 people following MikeH_PR, so let's draw some of them in with a more concerted effort.
I rebranded the account to represent this newsletter, built a list comprising of only the Substack writers I admire and still avoided the timeline. And I started tweeting.
A lot.
It was an instant timesuck. The first evening saw me devoting an hour to grazing and sharing on there that left me feeling empty and my Substack inbox unread.
I'm like the alcoholic who can't have just the one.
I also felt riled by stupid replies and retweets of my 'pithier' observations by people I could see weren’t really getting the point.
A few 'important' people followed @RarelyC_news and I noticed a swelling of the ego. Always a bad sign. That shit makes you lose your bearings.
And, unexpectedly, one Substack writer I admire turned out to be really annoying on Twitter. I know him to be a deep and nuanced writer. But on Twitter he's just another hot instant take merchant.
So it isn't just me who becomes a dick in that environment. Phew.
Then there was the ego prick of the disappearing blue tick. I'd been verified years ago and it had made a big difference. Suddenly the tick was gone, yesterday morning I think. And with it an obvious change in the algorithm which suddenly saw my efforts disappearing into the void.
Never mind, I lied to myself. It will just take patience to rebuild a presence.
Then, yesterday, a writer I admire here subscribed here and recommended RC to their audience. New people signed up. I looked at the stats and, from the two dozen sign-ups over the last ten days, only one was from Twitter.
I was wasting my time there and running the risk of wasting more as time went on.
Sleeping on the decision to quit I woke knowing that it was the right thing to do.
It was no great principled stand because Elon Musk is suddenly iterating at breakneck speed and being a general dick with his new toy. I never minded him buying it because the previous owners seemed like c***s to me anyway.
The decision was made and then Elon tweeted this.
And I thought let's just get on with it, because he's basically right.
So I just got on with it and that's that.
And that's that for this update too.