THIS month was the first month since early 2009 that I didn't do Social Control Media at all (no Diaspora, no Fediverse, no Twitter, no WordPress.com, no MINDS, no Tumblr). What I said about a week ago is still true; the sole regret was that I hadn't left sooner. While sites like Twitter get optimised for hate it's difficult to reconcile any participation. If you're there, you're helping "the machine"...
"The short story is, I don't miss anything about Social Control Media."The Twitter account did not get deleted, just abandoned. As can be seen above, the moment you stop participating is the moment you realise 951,000 past "tweets" aren't seen much, unlike proper, long-form articles. The 'shelf life' of "tweets" is incredibly short and I can imagine the same is true for Facebook (maybe due to the way the information is organised, with infinite scrolling and poor searching capabilities, no cross-referencing etc.), so it helps reaffirm what I've said repeatedly for years. When I was last abroad (that was an unusually long time ago, Christmas 2018 in Germany, 10 months before COVID-19) I didn't post anything in Social Control Media and the effect was similar. When you leave Social Control Media nobody really "misses" you (or barely anyone). People carry on bickering and "engaging", just not with you. And so you can spend more time reading proper literature and proper journalism, not "tweets"...
In a couple of days the EPO goes on strike, so we'll probably have a lot to say and publish. Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos aren't hurt by a bunch of 'tweets'; in fact, they'd probably prefer it if all the criticism they got was in some 'tweets', whose 'shelf life' is the same as a pierced apple's.
The short story is, I don't miss anything about Social Control Media. I lost 13 years on that thing... Social Control Media may give you the feeling that you accomplish something, but once you leave you realise it was mostly an illusion. Heck, even IRC is a much better use of time and communication is a lot easier in IRC (better UI and rapid exchanges). A third of my life was spent/wasted on Social Control Media. I am not going back there. ⬆