Tweeting to the Void
I’ve previously written about how I turned off Facebook’s news feed. I keep an account with Facebook because people occasionally contact me there. It is also an unfortunate truth that many companies in Jordan (where I live) or in the wider Middle East only have representation on Facebook instead of their own website. (Why they insist on doing this baffles me and is perhaps a topic for a future post).
I have long preferred Twitter as a medium for filtering through or touching – however obliquely – things going on at any particular moment. I have no pretensions to actively follow every single tweet to pass through my feed. Rather, it’s something I dip into every now and then.
Increasingly in recent months, I found myself growing dissatisfied with the pull it often has on me. It has become something of a truism to state that ‘twitter isn’t what it once was’, but there’s less and less long-term benefit in following discussions as and when they happen.
RescueTime tells me that I spent 86 hours and 16 minutes on Twitter in 2017 – just under quarter of an hour each day. That feels like a lot to me.
Enter ‘Tweet to the Void’. This is a Chrome extension. (For Firefox and other browsers, I have to imagine things like this exist.) When I visit twitter.com, the feed is not visible. All I see is somewhere to post a tweet if that’s what I want to do. (There is still some value in posting blogposts and articles there, since I know some people don’t use RSS). Of course, I can always turn off the extension with ease, but adding this extra step has effectively neutralised Twitter for me.
Try it; see how you feel about having something standing in the way of your social media fix. Let me know how you get on.
Get new posts by email
Every new post, technical and personal, sent when I publish. Unsubscribe any time. Prefer a feed reader? There's technical RSS and personal RSS.