The best thing Elon has done for my life is to fuck up Twitter.
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I used to access Twitter through an elegant little app called Flamingo. I’d curated a reasonably small group of people to follow—family and friends; a handful of authors, journalists, and journalism critics; a few cosplayers. It was important to keep those numbers low, as I’m obsessively completist: I need to scroll all the way back until I’ve read everything. I can’t just dip in and out.
Then Elon’s self-owning purchase of Twitter went through. There was plenty stuff to be annoyed about. “Verified” became “able to afford $8”; that wasn’t a huge deal for me personally, since I wasn’t looking to expand how many people I follow. There was a bit of a lurch to the Right; again, not a huge deal for me personally, since my feed was so curated—though some of the people I follow left from frustration at the increasingly brazen hate speech.
And, of course, lots of new porn bot followers!
Then they shut off the API used by third-party apps. I had to switch over to the official Twitter app, which is nowhere near as elegant as Flamingo was. Worse, I had to put up with “promoted” tweets, which (a) were annoying and (b) increased the length of my feed by what seemed like a third. That’s really bad for a completist.
I stuck with it for a few weeks, but reading (and writing about) Seth Godin’s new book made me want to crack open Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism again. And that led me to uninstall Twitter from my phone.
I am genuinely sad to say that I haven’t missed it at all. I say that I’m sad because I do miss Margaret Sullivan’s or Jay Rosen’s incisive critiques of political journalism. I miss the quirky tweets and retweets from author William Gibson. I miss others.
But I don’t miss Twitter. Even though I have it on my computer, the experience—not to mention Elon’s Elonness—has been so bad that, despite the people whose work I miss, I haven’t even been tempted to log in.
The crap experience on Twitter led me to notice how crappy my Facebook experience has been, as well. I’ve deleted that from my phone, too, and I’m working on ways to limit what I see on the browser; at last count, between a third and a half of the posts on my feed are ads or clickbait. I hate it.
Of course, Facebook made curating one’s feed much harder—perhaps impossible!—but I haven’t quite given up hope yet.
So: thank you Elon! You’ve made my life better, helping me to reclaim a lot of time for higher quality activities.
(And yes, I recognize the irony in posting a link to this on my Facebook feed….)
Top photo is a meme that Elon posted to his Twitter account.