Is there anything more boring than some tedious article pontificating about Twitter? I suspect not, but seeing as in the past I have written this piece here, that piece there, and indeed this other piece over there, I clearly haven’t got the memo yet.
With that in mind, I’ll make this short. Three weeks into my break from Twitter, how am I feeling?
- I am generally happier and less stressed. I thought maybe just being upset/irritated/angered by loads of stuff was simply how I’d feel reading things everywhere online these days. But no, it’s the misery being delivered in concentrated form in my Twitter timeline that I can’t deal with.
- On the other hand, I genuinely do feel like I’m missing out on fun stuff. Every time I poke my head in, I see something fun or a great article which I would otherwise have missed. I’m also missing important things I want to know about; a steady diet of misery was making me sad, but it’s not like I want to avoid certain topics entirely.
- Nearly every single day I have something short I really want to say, but now have nowhere to say it. I mean, maybe the world doesn’t need to hear about my criticisms of the later Nice Family sketches in Absolutely, but I’m sure there are at least a few people who would be interested.1
Maybe all the above seems massively obvious, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if I am currently eliciting a few eye-rolls. But confirmation that it really was mainly Twitter which was causing me problems is a slight surprise. I thought maybe I’d just find other parts of the net to be just as frustrating these days. Nope. Twitter is both immensely useful and fun… and also an absolute pain in the arse.
The answer: a suitable client, and a hell of a lot of extensive muting, I think. There are people I really want to hear from on some topics… and need to avoid other things they post entirely for the sake of my own sanity. At least my little break provided me with confirmation of that, rather than just guessing.
The sketch in Series 3 where Mother and Father indulge in bondage seems to entirely miss the point of the characters. And why can’t Jack Docherty do Father’s voice properly in Series 4? ↩