Leaving The Blue Bird (for now)

It’s been more than a week since I decided to suspend my Twitter account.

I removed myself from a place considered a primary source of insights into technology, politics and culture. All my lists of people to follow are gone. The number of followers is literally zero. My digital presence has diminished by a few percent.

What was the motivation behind this move?

New job

During my time as a programmer, I was always referring to Twitter when going through the interviews and being asked about my ways of obtaining knowledge.

Musk’s newest gig was a place that was keeping me in the loop of updates from front-end role models, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders. It was nearly impossible to miss the new version of a framework, library or programming language while being a heavy user of Twitter. It was something that I benefited from a lot.

By entering this new world of engineering management, I subconsciously unsubscribed myself from this mindset of pursuing the latest and newest at all costs. Humans, and how to work with them, is what pay my bills. Staying in the game, observing the environment, making assumptions, testing, and revalidating them are what influence this new chapter of my professional career. Thinking deeply about all the loops in the system I’m in is what helps me develop new skills and leverage these observations to deliver value without coding.

As of today, I don’t think that Twitter helps me grow professionally in any meaningful way. With new algorithms influencing content reach, audience engagement, and overall dynamics of this platform, I’m struggling to accept the ratio between costs and benefits that I get from it.

New priorities

I’m not sure how deep you are into introspections, but self-examining myself, my actions, reactions, thoughts, and decisions is crucial part of navigating the world around me.

It’s not that I was always drawing the right conclusions, but even facing the wrong ones was often eye-opening. Due to introspections, I noticed something that became more and more concerning, and it was about shortened attention span that I had toward external inputs. Twitter, with its core communication model of short sentences and snappy dunks, was not helping in changing this in the way I’d hope it to be changed.

It’s been only eight days into my thirties, but I want to make this new decade of my life about something more than followers, threads, and apps that steal the time that I could spend in the physical world. All the recent events I’ve been through helped me better understand what I really value, what is scarce and thus should be secured by all means, and how far the time on Twitter is from all of that.

The experiment that I want to start is about jumping on new trends with a healthy time buffer that I was previously lacking.

New Twitter

Speaking about Twitter, let me walk you through the most rant-like part of this short writing. Today’s Twitter - or, I should rather say - the local social media bubble I developed on Twitter, is nothing but a marketplace driven by new engagement-generation formats.

It’s been difficult to watch during the Crypto bubble of 2021/2022, and the burst of advancements in AI only proves my point.

Probably I’m heavily biased and I’m like this guy who wants to buy a new car and suddenly every car around him becomes the one he’s dreaming about, but my Twitter feed has been recently taken over by threads, clickbaits, and other techniques that are trying to influence my decisions and steer my attention towards tweet authors. It’s even more annoying when you compare the content you see over there to the LinkedIn profiles of these people.

It would be much easier if I could turn a blind eye to it, but due to the awareness I developed in this area, it’s difficult to be unseen.

…

So there it is - my Twitter is now suspended, heading toward deletion, and I want to see how ‘painful’ it is to live without Twitter.

You may ask - isn’t removing your account like distancing yourself from all the knowledge this app contains? First - the knowledge, as mentioned above, comes with costs I no longer want to deal with. Second, the knowledge is still around me, but I will look for it using different channels - long-form podcasts, articles, and aggregators that are not optimized for engagement. Third, I think I’m finally ready to separate being on top of the news from gaining something useful out of it.

Let the experiment begin.