Keeping this one brief – this was too long for Twitter, and I wanted something I could point people to if they go asking for me.

Editor’s note: I didn’t intend for this to be as long as it ended up being. Sorry. No, I will not be altering the scope, or size of the post while editing. Thank you for understanding.

Some folks may have noticed that I haven’t posted much of anything on Twitter as of late. That was a conscious decision. I’m still doing fine, and have continued posting here on my blog.

So what gives? Why have I abandoned Twitter? Simply put – the site wasn’t fulfilling its primary purpose anymore.

I originally signed up for Twitter to advertise my blog. I figured that it’d be easier to grow my network through social media than it would be to yeet my writing out into the void. Hilariously, the latter has worked better for me in the long term than Twitter ever has. Just to give you some numbers: 88% of my traffic this year has been driven by search engine results. By comparison: Twitter is barely over 1%. That’s also down 80% from last year, and 90% from the year before.

Now I know what some of y’all are thinking: 1% is still something. Yes – yes it is. Counter point: Twitter sucks big ol’ Bouffalant balls.

I don’t actually like what Twitter does to me. I used to spend a lot of time scrolling through it mindlessly whenever I was bored. I still do this with Youtube, and Steam, but they never have anything interesting to show me. As such, I have a much easier time catching myself mindlessly scrolling, which allows me to switch gears into something more productive. That’s not to say I need to start writing a blog post, but if I need to go on autopilot for a bit then I can do some cleaning, or go for a walk in the woods behind my house that is infested with tweakers. Something – anything more productive than Twitter.

There’s also just how much the site has degraded over the last few years. I know everyone likes to dunk on Elon Musk, and I get it. He’s a really easy target. Hilariously easy. My parents even know who he is, and think he’s a fucking jaggle. And sure, the Musk era of Twitter has been a giant dumpster fire. Fellow blogger Wilhelm Arcturus of The Ancient Gaming Noob has chronicled the ongoing crusade of nonsense. I highly recommend giving those posts a read, which you can start here.

But no – Musk isn’t solely responsible for the decline of Twitter. Even before he took over, Twitter was already starting to move in a lot of the same directions that Musk has aggressively pulled them into over the past few months. Tweets that promoted offsite content were buried, people would get shadow-banned with no explanation, and paid advertisements were embedded in increasing volumes across the site. It became increasingly hard to use Twitter to actually network unless you were a brand paying for ad space.

None of the aforementioned changes put me off as much as outrage content taking over the site. You know what I mean – when someone posts something intentionally inflammatory, and then it explodes. Then you’re subjected to it because some thoughtless person you follow decided to dunk this absolutely shit-ass take without considering how they’d be signal boosting it through to their whole following. I hate that shit.

However, enragement drives engagement, so this kind of content was constantly being pushed into every user’s feed. I couldn’t go a day without reading something truly awful on Twitter. It was so frequent that I couldn’t even work up the ability to be upset. I’m not going to pretend I’m a saint myself, but some of the people on Twitter make me look like one by comparison.

So I decided either shortly before April, or on April first (I honestly can’t remember) to cease using Twitter in any meaningful capacity. I still have my account so I can look up tweets for news, or reference, but I won’t be doing much tweeting myself. That also means I won’t be tweeting out whenever a new article goes live on the blog, not that I think it mattered because Twitter was suppressing all of those tweets anyway.

For the folks who relied on Twitter to find my stuff – I know who you are, and I appreciate that y’all have stuck with me. If you want to continue to keep tabs on me I do have an email subscription you can use. To the best of my knowledge, it only emails you when something new is posted, so there shouldn’t be any spam coming your way. Alternatively, you could also just check the site every 2 weeks. There’s usually something new every 5 to 10 days. I understand that’s a little annoying, but you will have my unending gratitude if you continue to follow my work in any capacity. Y’all are real ones.

For everyone else – it’ll just be business as usual.

I know this was a fluff piece, but I wanted a single written body I could point to if people were wondering why I’ve been avoiding Twitter.

Thank you, as always, for reading. I hope to see you in the next one.