As of this morning, I have deactivated my Twitter account (so eventually it will disappear completely). Today’s changes in the way the platform is run meant that I needed to get off it, not just to avoid trolling and flaming, but also (more important) to avoid being hacked.
I was asked to make my blog postings available through Twitter, by people who didn’t want to access them through Facebook or by subscribing to my blog. Initially, this was just pure hassle for me: after doing all the crafting of writing, illustrating, and formatting a blog posting, I had to create a complex indirect linking scheme to Facebook (to avoid its censors) and a zippy come-on for Twitter. And then somehow respond to comments on three different platforms, with different audiences, plus further comments arriving in e-mail.
Twitter regularly sent me a tranche of tweets selected just for me — alas, selected by an AI program that used my searches in gathering material for my postings, so what I got was tweets from two people I actually wanted to read (Nancy Friedman and Tim Wilson), plus a lot of weird junk, but mostly stuff from hunky guys selling their bodies on OnlyFans. No more.
Meanwhile, I started following two young people — of an age to be my grandchildren — who are entry points for me into subcultures I have no personal experience of — Kirby Conrod in the US, Richard Vytniorgu in the UK. Which threw up vast numbers of brief comments and retweets, unmanageable numbers, but things I could scan in moments to pick up hints of things I might want to pursue. That I miss.
None of the rest.
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