When Twitter Stops Being Fun

I used to love Twitter. The connections that it helped me form with people in the infosec community helped kickstart my career, and I definitely attribute a lot of my success to those connections. But lately, Twitter seems to have changed.

I'm not the first person to write about this, and I certainly won't be the last, but Twitter has become a pretty unpleasant place over the last year or two. It feels like a place that people simply go to complain, or discuss the most recent #tragedy, or just toot their own horn, and it didn't used to be that way.

When I started getting active on Twitter, communities were smaller, and it felt like a place that you could form friendships and real, personal connections. I talked to people that I looked up to as mentors, and I commiserated with friends as they went through hard times in their lives. These were people that I hadn't yet met in person, but I could rattle off where they worked, what was going on in their lives, who to reach out to if you were in a city for a few days and wanted to find a good place for dinner.

But these days, when I go on Twitter, I mindlessly scroll through and then close the app. Any postings I make on my own account are basically just IFTTT recipes that fired off because I posted something here or on Instagram, places that I'd much rather spend my time and attention on. Since I've stepped back from the podcast for a little while, I'm not even digging through Twitter for stories and discussion topics, and even if I were, Nuzzel would take care of that without having to wade through people sniping at each other for their opinions on the story.

I realize that it's partially a problem of my own making. "The Twitter experience" is based on the people that you follow, and if I don't like what I see on Twitter, well, perhaps I should change who I follow. I think that's why I like Instagram so much these days: I follow people that relate to my hobbies, instead of people that relate to work.

All that to say, I've deleted Tweetbot from all of my devices for the foreseeable future. If I miss it (I won't) then maybe I'll revisit Twitter, but I'm not too worried about it.