And it felt great.

A brief history of me and Twitter.

I joined it in January, 2007. It was and still is (to a degree) a great way to cultivate a microcosm based community of people and things I like talking to, engaging with and hearing from. I’ve made friends on Twitter, been in the news from it, been close to the founders. A lot of people I know have gone through the halls of Twitter from the original office to now.

I tweeted almost 37,000 times over the time span. I made it an ecosystem that I consumed like a forced drink of water. The glass would fill when I wasn’t paying attention, and I’d drink the whole thing before moving on to the current state of affairs.

There was the fear of missing something, some news, new technology or quip. Something I could give input on, or research, or save to Pocket and never come back to again.

I gave Twitter a lot, it gave me something in return. Then it started taking, and taking, and taking. It never got smarter, or more empathetic to the needs of its user base. It became not an enjoyable pursuit but a duty, then an obligation. Then a forced ride in a flaming subway car.

So I got off. I deleted the app from my phone and my desktop and stopped reading every tweet.

The result: I didn’t miss it. The news still came in, but this time at the end of a day and through some of other means off aggregation. I missed some DM’s (sorry!) and some people that don’t use Facebook or Instagram as much, but the rawness of the feed turned out to be noise.

Assembling reality from the fragments of nuance is as foolish as making a snowman by catching flakes in mid-air.

Wait until it all settles, then figure out what you have.