Real Life and I had some quality time together yesterday. It was splendid.

Yesterday was quite an intense day, considering that I was at school from 8:15 to 8:30 (that's A.M. to P.M.) doing various grad school things, including some very scary things like giving my final presentation. (The above timeline also had a short break for non-educational things, also known as lunch.)

This was an intense and slightly scary day, as presentations and team projects inherently are. But I also realized that it felt good - it felt great to be away from depressing and discouraging political posts. I was even OK with fasting from memes for a while. I survived.

I have no problem with debate, in and of itself. Unfortunately, political discussion - especially online political discussion - is getting more and more polarized and toxic. Twitter certainly isn't the only place that's struggling with the issue of having civil, rational political discourse, but Twitter political talk is especially lacking in insight and deep thought. Twitter users are more interested in symbols than action, identity rather than ideas. (They get more upset over the existence of antique war memorials or a mediocre-ish quarterback for a lousy NFL team peacefully protesting during a football game than things that have a tangible effect on people's lives.)

I still feel it's important to be informed about what's going on in the world, including in the political sphere. However, it's very, very difficult to have a nuanced political discussion in 140 characters or less, particularly in today's climate. Twitter is not a very good place to get actual information - especially in-depth information.

Maybe I'm complacent and part of the problem myself, but considering that I only have 169 followers (many of whom are inactive or spambots), I'm pretty sure that anything I post in Twitter Land isn't going to have an appreciable impact. I think I'd be far better off using my energy in real life - or post things on MFGG or here, which people find a lot more interesting anyway, at least measured by the number of impressions they get. (MFGG and the BT Forums are not exactly big communities, so this is further evidence of my superpower of being ignored on social media, especially Twitter.)

I've been on Twitter for over eight years now. Until recently, I always enjoyed hanging out with the little blue Twitter bird, but the quality of conversation has steadily gone downhill. If there was a way to limit my timeline to art and other non-controversial content, I'd be a lot more enthusiastic about tweeting again. A lot of the features for making Twitter great again - like the word filter that blocks posts with words like "Trump", or the setting that puts Twitter's timeline back in chronological order the way it should be - don't actually work properly. At this point, using Twitter lists is the only way the service is tolerable.

I can't say I'll never use Twitter again, but it's definitely time to take a break. As you can probably tell (actually, you probably didn't notice, because you're not dangerously obsessed with everything I do), I haven't been tweeting much lately anyway.

Maybe I'll use my Twitter vacation to post more stuff here or on MFGG. (I probably won't, but I could!)
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Edited by: Bibby, Aug 15th, 2017 @ 9:36 pm

It's as I've said before:
"Politics make Klungo head hurt."

Sadly, while twitter is definitely among the most visible of them, the problem is very widespread around the internet.