Why I Quit Twitter
between Twitter, Blogger and Medium
I’m not sure when exactly I joined twitter but it was forever ago. The Treespotter account was among the earlier Indonesian accounts, somewhere in the early thousand. I can’t remember how much followers I had when I quit. Like more than fifty thousand but less than a hundred, I think. No idea.
The name Treespotter came from a train ride across Lincolnshire ages ago in a different life.
Far before that, I used the name to sign up for Blogger, back also when @ev was still with the company and prior to the Google days.
If I recall correctly, Blogger being acquired by Google was the reason I surrendered and signed up for Google. I wanted to continue blogging.
I was well aware of the potential nightmare from how the internet was shaping and where Google was going. Eventually, they will own everything and my whole sole existence will be decided by algorithm. It was a scary thought and I blogged about it a lot.
Long story short, when Blogspot was acquired by Google, the emails accounts became associated and that kinda tied me down to Google services. It wasn’t by design but simply driven by necessity. When Twitter came around, it was just the simplest to use and therefore it became my twitter handle @Treespotter. Very early in Medium launch some while ago, I also had a Medium account with the same name.
I liked Twitter enough until it went past my Blog readership. Way past. I had almost 100k followers before most people in country even heard of twitter.
I never knew there were that many people reading my blog. My blogs were set with the highest privacy setting — the blogspot ones weren’t even indexed by Google for a long while. During my brief experiment with SEO/SEM automatons, I ran campaigns to reverse optimize search result to not return mine, because even knowing that they were published on the internet, they were never intended to be a write up for the public. The blog was just my own private empty wall of music. Feel free to have a look, but I’m not exactly building it to be a feature in the city square.
I guess it’s also partly about Twitter growing very rapidly and becoming more accessible to people in Indonesia (I also sometimes write twit in Indonesian). The network multiplier effect delivers different dynamics — as a social network, it works uniquely with its own characteristics of instant distribution and unquestionable reliance on 140 characters event summary. It’s very Warholian — instead of their 15 minutes, everyone gets their own 140 characters fit in the collective conscious of mankind, for no apparent reasons.
Tens of thousands of people doing that was just too much. It gets very uncomfortable for me. It interfered with my professional life. It messed about with my personal life. Twitter was doing more damage than good. I don’t think anyone really want 100k people around.
So I quit. And now I have a new one. But only because I needed the Twitter account to use on Medium. For now and in the near future, find me here.
