I finally quit Twitter

End of an era

I finally deleted my Twitter account(s). It only took 14 years. That’s a big chunk of my lifetime, but thankfully I didn’t burn all of that lifetime in Twitter itself.

But why?

Announcing the departure from a social media platform is hardly news, especially from unnewsworthy folks like me.¹ I originally opened a Twitter account as a graduate student to tweet positively about Dropbox; in return, they permanently gave me 350MB of extra storage in my account. Graduate students are famously professional freeloaders, but the extra room for document and analysis results storage was definitely worth the 60 seconds spent posting a tweet of corporate PR copypasta.²

Even better, I didn’t log into Twitter for years afterwards. I only retook the doomscrolling vice as a postdoc. And then I couldn’t stop scrolling for years. I even made a backup account when an unexpected phone failure precipitated an MFA lockout from my Twitter account. The subsequent and frustratingly unhelpful Twitter customer support drove me nuts.³

I probably would have stayed glued to my Twitter app if it hadn’t changed owners. I’m hardly the first (or last) person to note how badly the discourse declined when Twitter became X.⁴ Coupled with the isolation of the pandemic, I saw two choices: either burn more time on something unproductive that doesn’t make me happy, or… just quit? The latter choice was easier than I suspected, but maybe only because everything else in the world seemed hard at the time.

Quitting and deleting are not the same thing

My Twitter account(s) lingered unused for a few more years, with plenty of my dumb juvenile thoughts growing stale and losing context. I occasionally wondered if my old tweets would get read back to me in court, or (worse) during a job interview. Anybody who spent time on Twitter knew the nonzero risk of getting doxxed for an unpopular view. Unpopularity, like beauty, was in the mind of the beholder, not the opiner. And like many people, I had publicly and contemporaneously (and stupidly) opined about current events at the time under my real name and headshot. But there was usually some human effort involved in digging up Twitter dirt on somebody. Until I held a visible public profile, why bother cleaning up my Internet footprint? Laziness and status quo bias kept my accounts quiet but alive, until I read this.

If computers are good at anything, it’s at executing on long-running tasks that humans cannot physiologically or psychologically handle well. A human could only compile a damning dossier on someone during their waking hours; an AI agent could do it until somebody killed the power on its host. Worse, AI agents are paragons of pernicious perseverance. Who would ever want an AI agent unleashed like a bloodhound on their Internet history? Suddenly the risk of leaving an unused social media account felt dramatically higher than before.

What was lost

My accounts are dead, insofar as Twitter’s account deactivation and deletion protocols are real.⁵ Certainly my life after deleting Twitter accounts isn’t dramatically different from when I first quit the Twitter doomscrolling habit. I feel better about my privacy and personal safety, to the extent that I had any before.

But for reasons I don’t fully understand, I still mourn the loss.

My lost life, for sure. I enjoyed my Twitter feed at the time, even if in retrospect I defintely could’ve spent my time on healthier or more productive pursuits. But what I really miss was the endless train of wit and snark and social commentary at my fingertips, mixed with random personal updates and served with a heaping side of dyspeptic misanthropy. I miss the discussions, the real-time development of news, the succinct truths, the golden insight and the pyrite commentary. The ASHG meme accounts. Chrissy Teigen’s attitude. BethAnn McLaughlin duping a boatload of scientists with a fake persona’s death. Shaun King duping more people (even me) with his activist grandstanding. Black Twitter (Black Twitter was dope). The scientists and authors that I followed. The virtue signaling and posturing and self promotion and honest discussions and unfiltered thoughts and discursive threads. I miss the entirety of it all.

But I realize that the communities that I miss are largely broken or gone. Many left like me during Twitter’s ownership upheaval. AI bots filled the user void to cosplay the ghosts of Twitter past.⁶ But time is what really finished putting those communities in their grave. Time, like water, is a patient pulverizer. I trust that time will wash away any residue of my years of wasted life on that terrible website. Someday nothing on Twitter will have mattered. And for that reason, I’m glad that I left.