Cold Turkey Twitter

I Quit. The new oligarchic owner with an adolescent's impulse control gave me the push I needed. I've "deactivated" my account which is apparently the closest thing to leaving Twitter you can get. No withdrawal symptoms but it's only been 24 hours and this morning I was on tiktok so long I got the warning video. "Hold on! You've been scrolling WAY too long...." Or am I the only one that gets those? Is it after two hours? Three?

Twitter never showed concern for time or anything else. I used Tweetdeck to create news and topic columns. I didn't see the ads or promoted tweets. It was like a old school ticker tape - news scrolling down my screen. It is invaluable for breaking news and events. But step off into the discussion and you're tripped up and tied down like Gulliver by little lying Lilliputian trolls.

In the many years that I've "reported"  accounts that were obviously fake, abusive, or purposefully misleading, Twitter never determined a single one violated their narrowly defined policies. Nearly every thread of substance and topical interest, and there are many, is infested with professional and amateur trolls within hours of posting. They dispirit, dishearten, misdirect, mislead, question consensus, suppress, degrade, intimidate and threaten.

Done with it. I re-upped subscriptions to Santa Fe New Mexican and WaPo and honed the tiktok algorithm to feed me videos of   horses. Horses running, jumping, doing tricks, getting groomed, pulling things, having foals, having surgery, having snacks....