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Earlier this morning I deleted one of my twitter avataar and account @d7y. This was primarily meant for communication with friends, and people at large for topics not related to software engineering. Which meant pretty much a whole bunch of trivial and non trivial topics.

Twitter is a firehose. And for a brain which thrives on information its an addictive firehose. That was something I had dealt with a little earlier and felt comfortable I had worked around. It did require continued effort to make sure it didn’t become a waste of time.

I realised some aspects of twitter which worked negatively

a. Twitter is a great way of expression. But increasing incidence of #wtf and #fail made me realise just like others I was using it more (even if I didn’t tweet the specific hashtags much). In general when you find yourself in a world where tons of people are out criticising tons of other things – the negativism levels rise even if you don’t want to feel negative. Much as in my mind I malign the younger generation of thinking too highly of themselves (an accusation that probably applies to any generation from the one preceding it), I was realising twitter is an environment where if you are not careful, it is quite possible to start believing yourself to be more important than you deserve to be.

b. Twitter debates do not have the real life feedback so necessary. There are no facial expressions, no grunts that warn you etc. And it has some extremely opinionated and expressive people. In many ways I thought it provided the right fertiliser for my argumentative outlook. I like being argumentative but did not like that over a period of time twitter was reducing the threshold at which I became argumentative. And that was not good for others and certainly not for myself.

This is not to say twitter isn’t a good tool. Its just to say its a tool and so long as you can wield it creatively and effectively its great. If it starts wielding you – its time to say good bye.