After waking up this morning I went through my normal routine---making coffee, meditation, and prayers--but something was missing. What was missing was that I didn't check my Twitter feed. This is because I have no Twitter feed anymore, as I deactivated my personal account yesterday and removed the apps from my smart devices. It took several tries to deactivate. Twitter didn't want to let me go. I also deleted my low-key professional account. I want nothing to do with Twitter anymore.
I knew it was time to jump ship when I heard the President at the rally at the Ellipse on Wednesday say that "Twitter is garbage." By the end of the day they had shut him out of his personal account, and deleted a video that called for peace. We know what they want. They want violence because it serves their cause.
I had joined Twitter in 2016 specifically because of The Donald subreddit, when that used to exist and was my main source of news in the 2016 election. In response to a call from the mainstream media to unfollow then-candidate Trump, there was an appeal among his followers for people to follow him on Twitter to boost his numbers. So I did. After the election, the Donald subreddit faded in influence.
Eventually the woke Trump-hating technocrats running Reddit ginned up an excuse to ban The Donald. But by that time, it was too late. The Donald had served its purpose getting him elections.
Leftists are always late to the party with their censorship. It is part of the general stupidity even while thinking they are smarter than everyone else. They can't help but bumble because they believe in their own power. All they accomplished was to gut Reddit as a platform, and it is now a shell of its former glory.
The same is now happening with Twitter. It has served its purpose as the vehicle for communication from Trump during his first Administration. Towards the end I was taking most of my cues from Trump's personal Twitter account, so without that, there is little point to staying there.
Twitter has to die. Like Facebook (which I abandoned in 2017, almost exactly four years ago right after the election) it will be a slow death, but nonetheless it is dying and will not come back.
Many conservative voices have already switched over to Parler, a new platform. I have an account there, and may begin using it, but for the moment.
Many conservative voices have already switched over to Parler, a new social media platform. I have an account there, and may begin using it, but for the moment I get the news I need by watching Youtube videos, including ones made my channels that read important Twitter threads outloud on the video. I
t's a slower consumption mode. I have to wait hours, sometimes a day or two, for videos to be created that dive into the issues people are discussing on social media. Its almost like watching the old nightly news in the 1970s, before the round-the-clock news cycle took over the culture.
All of a sudden, it seems like there is so much time in the day, especially since we don't watch television anymore.
I get flashbacks to what life was like before the Internet, when we had to fill our minds with thoughts of our own initiative, about things in our immediate vicinity rather than things happening all over the world.
Yesterday evening was a great day for book reading. It feels like walking beside a highway where you can hear people zooming by at eighty miles an hour. It feels good.
Edit: I discovered this morning that I was still getting email notifications from Twitter about posts I might be interested in. They seem to think I am interested in the off-hand thoughts of a certain famous U.S. Olympic gymnast and her Woke twenty-something politics. I realized I had another Twitter account that I'd made for a project I did a couple years ago, that I never used. I had to reset the password to this lost account and deactivate this account as well (my third deactivation in 24 hours) to stop receiving the gymnast's daily opinions in my Inbox. Ah, the things I won't miss.
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