I have been toying with deleting twitter for a long time. For a while twitter was very interesting. I also met a lot of interesting people, whom I then met in real life. I was also able to reach a wide audience for stats related papers, and for my students' research papers. If there were a twitter replacement for posting scientific papers, I would sign up. I guess google scholar notifications do that job, and blogs. I will post more on my blogs from now on.
So there is a lot of positive stuff to say about twitter, but there always was so much noise, even if one only follows stats-twitter. One also encountered a lot of truly crazy people. But what tipped me over was the recent crisis. This crisis resulted in everyone becoming an infectious diseases expert, posting advice and "useful" graphical summaries. Another weird thing that happened was that people started to whine. Their perfect lives had been ever so slightly disrupted. They couldn't do their Caribbean vacation, they couldn't go have a beer with their friends, they couldn't meet their relatives. Meanwhile there are people out there with serious life-threatening problems. This whole lot of people were just so...revolting. I decided to socially isolate myself from them. I even knew some of them well and liked them, but I realized I don't need to know how weak these people are mentally, and how spoilt they are by the luxury of good health and a basically normal life.
Discovering how much people are going to start whining if they experience even the slightest inconvenience is a bit like when you have known a friend for a long time, and you then suddenly discover something really unpleasant about them. Twitter delivers that kind of information about people, especially during this time.
Perhaps deleting twitter will give me a chance to re-set my life and develop a more inward-looking life, without any outside noise. I will continue to post cat pictures in my google photos album. I I will link to it from my home page. Because my cats deserve a wider audience; they are so wonderful.
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2 comments:
Shravan, just discovered this. Sad to see you go! Hope you change your mind one day. Maybe you can see that as a training lesson for learning to deal with things you cannot change :)
- moritz
Completely relate to this (especially the whining part). I am originally from Kyrgyzstan but live in Israel. Coming from a developing country with real problems (not a slight inconvenience like not being able to leave your comfortable apartment for a few weeks), I always have this perspective when I feel like whining about my daily problems like traffic. I also considered leaving twitter because of all the corona-related noise and whining. But I decided to stay for now - exactly because of the benefits you mentioned (like stats resources).
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