Twitter aka X
In case you were wondering: yes, I am off Twitter. You won’t find @swvanderlaan anymore.
Why?
There was a time where it was really useful. I was following interesting science accounts, for instance those of collaborators or people that produce cool stuff or that I look up to. I also followed some other non-science related accounts, you know, from the (Dutch) government, or news agencies. Especially in the science space it was awesome: someone would publish their paper and at the same time a very useful Twitter thread summarizing what they did. A great mini-summary. Others would do the same, but that from other people’s work; they’d make little mini-reviews. Again, extremely nice and useful.
However, ever since Twitter was sold and things changed behind the scenes, the amount of noise increased. I don’t know what they did to the algorithms or the system or whatever, but it stopped being useful. No longer I’d see the latest mini-summary or some news from someone I’d follow, but I’d be overwhelmed with all kinds of posts of accounts I don’t follow nor that I was interested in. Many of these were even fake - I mean I don’t believe these were real people given the weird Twitter-handles and judging the total illogical collection of posts by these accounts. And there were a lot of advertisements.
Basically, I couldn’t see the trees for the forest. I couldn’t see tweets from the journals I was following, nor from great science-accounts/people like Clint Miller, Mete Civelek or Sek Kathiresan.
For those politics-buffs: yes, I follow politics. And yes, the US-politics are wildly interesting. And yes, I’d definitely consider myself more liberal than conservative. Interestingly I admire the late John McCain, but likewise I admire AOC and that corner of the woods. Me stopping Twitter had nothing to do with politics - nor that of Twitter’s owner. I followed foreign and Dutch politicians from all kinds of flavors, even those that I would never in my lifetime support. I used Twitter as one of the means to help me understand the thought processes and politics of those parties and politicians that I would not support. It was very informative. It was useful.
No, it was the change in leadership at Twitter that caused a change in the way Twitter worked, that made me stop. Twitter simply stopped being useful to me. So, after a cooling down period, I downloaded all my data and deleted the account.
And no, I don’t miss it.
I may consider linking this site to Instagram or to LinkedIn. But I doubt I’d go back to Twitter. So far Mastodon has been of little use either - but you never know.
