I deleted my Twitter account a couple weeks ago. I hadn’t really used it for a few years and let it go fallow, but the Nazi salute was the reminder I needed to delete that shit.

I opened my account in March 2007 (during, apparently, the “first wave of people to join“) and was a heavy user for years. The bigger my job got, the more my usage dwindled, to the point where post-2020 I was barely tweeting. Then Dipshit bought the site and I all but petered out. Of course, I stopped using my Facebook account more than five years ago, and my life has been noticeably better since.

I used to be such a believe in the power of social media. Long before Twitter or Facebook existed, I read The Cluetrain Manifesto and thought it meant the end of marketing lies and political falsehoods as we knew them. I’m not sure I’ve ever been more wrong about anything. For some reason deleting my Twitter account seemed like the last nail in admitting that. Maybe that’s why I haven’t switched to BlueSky. It’s not that I need to do this somewhere else. It’s that there is no “this” anymore.