Twitter was an interesting experience, but I decided not to wait until December 31 to pull the plug. Why prolong the goodbye? Instead, I pulled the plug tonight, and while this means I've cut myself off from my primary source of quickly self-updating news, I'm thinking to myself that maybe that's not a bad thing. Culture can accelerate just fine without me. Given that I'm in my late forties, I already know what it's like to feel older and somewhat irrelevant compared to America's plugged-in teens, and that feeling is perfectly fine with me.
Not sure how many friends I made on Twitter—at a guess, none—but I certainly made a few friendly acquaintances. At one point, I had thought about tallying up my followers and followees to see how liberal or conservative my bias was; I suspect I had a pretty good balance of the two political polarities, balanced guy that I am.
And depending on whether I manage to catch my Gab.ai invite this time around, I might be back to tweeting, but at a different location—and it'll be called "gabbing," I guess.
I was on Twitter since about 2010, apparently—the year my mother died. Maybe I needed the comfort of the horde back then. Well, I'm a different Kevin now, and since blogging is my first love, I'll be sticking with that, and will hopefully be blogging more substantively as a consequence of leaving quip-happy Twitter.
Because I didn't really make friends on Twitter, I suspect that most of my now-ex Twitter followers won't bother to read this blog, so my site traffic—such as it is—will drop to an even lower hum. That, too, is fine; people are welcome to buzz in desultorily, hang out, sniff around, leave remarks, or just leave—whatever the spirit moves them to do. I'm easy.
Been real, Twitter, but I don't need you anymore.
Wednesday, December 14, 2016
Twitter account deactivated
11 comments:
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Twittercide.
ReplyDeleteI was wondering if you were deleting the account completely, or just deactivating it. I just checked and it seems that your page is still there, but has trouble resolving and times out. I suspect you deleted and the system is slowly purging you out...
What happens if someone comes around and takes the old @bighominid handle? What about your brand dude! There could be imposters out there before you know it!
Perhaps *I* shall become the virtual squatter on the old handle! Your identity shall me mine!!!! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Or not...
Mike,
ReplyDeleteTwitter offers a "deactivate account" procedure; I didn't see an out-and-out delete option. The site does warn you, when you embark on the deactivation, that you can re-open your account within 30 days, but after that time, the account will be permanently deleted. I suppose that's a good bit of marketing, from Twitter's perspective, as it catches many of the people experiencing "quitter's remorse."
So Twitter is really offering a deactivate-then-delete procedure, I reckon. By mid-January, my presence there will have been erased.
A sign of things to come. Smart investors are shorting "progressive" companies like Twitter as their business model seems predicated on alienating half their customer base. It's a pretty retarded strategy, one must concede. At the same time, many social-media firms are likely to take a massive hit once our current stock-market bubble begins to deflate (or burst spectacularly). And it most certainly will, mark my words.
ReplyDeleteWe are entering an entirely new social, civilizational and global paradigm. Thanks largely to the Internet, people are starting to wake up and realize that we have been living in a progressive dream or fantasy for the past several decades. Humankind is out of balance with the natural world, with the natural order of countless millennia. A massive correction is both inevitable and quite necessary, lest the entire world implode upon itself. I fear it may already be too late to reverse the damage, but one must try nonetheless. Think of the children, after all!
For what it is worth, your page appears to be gone now. All the tweets by you I've liked over the years also appear to be gone. I suppose they are hidden in the ether of the Twitter servers for another 29 days before being cast out into the outer darkness...
ReplyDeleteMike,
ReplyDelete"For what it is worth, your page appears to be gone now. All the tweets by you I've liked over the years also appear to be gone."
You make it sound so sad. For me, my disappearance from Twitter is as insignificant as a single bubble popping in a bubble bath. Few will care; fewer will remember; even fewer will follow up.
(Okay, now I'm making it sound so sad...)
The page may be gone, but the link to "Infernal Shrieking" is still present in the sidebar.
ReplyDeleteCharles,
ReplyDeleteYeah, that's where the Twitter widget for blogs resided. I could take the widget down, but if I end up replacing it with Gab, I'm only going to put the whole thing back up again. What I may do is keep the allotted space itself where it is, title and all, but replace the widget's HTML with some tag like "Under Construction" or something. At least until I know whether I've actually become a Gab member.
...or you could be keeping it there just in case you end up drunk dialing Twitter at two o'clock in the morning, sobbing and sniveling as you beg her to take you back.
ReplyDeleteCharles,
ReplyDeleteLike a good cloner, I've taken the nuclear material out of the cell, and we're now awaiting new nuclear material to put into the cell.
(In other words, I've removed the HTML from the widget and will replace it with Gab-related HTML if/when the time comes, so in the meantime, there'll be no snivelly drunk-calling, thank you very much.)
You never know on those cold, lonely nights...
ReplyDeleteOne point to ponder, if you want to keep the door open to revisiting Twitter at some point in time, but want to maintain the same twitter handle would be to sneak online late at night one night, re-activate, wait 24 hours, then de-activate again, and buy yourself more time, and be able to preserve your "brand."
ReplyDeleteJust a thought.
I, for one, will miss having our quasi-immediate interactions; however, I am always open for more substantiative interactions.