Yet it wouldn’t be much of a surprise if this moment turns out to be the peak for Twitter. After the election, a handful of Twitter loyalists confessed to feeling alienation over the role the service played in their lives, and the country, this year.

“At best, it was just quips and outrages — a diet of candy,” wrote Brent Simmons, a well-known software developer who took his feed dark after blaming the service for, among other things, being part of the system that helped elect Mr. Trump.

But it was less partisan outrage and more a feeling of exhaustion that inspired a new round of quitter Twitter last week.

“Twitter is toxic,” tweeted Steve Kovach, a writer at the Business Insider website who likened the service to an unshakable addiction. “I can’t stand it anymore,” he told me in a private message on Twitter. “I started regularly deleting my tweets this summer and unfollowed everyone and started over. It was driving me nuts and making me sad.” Mr. Kovach said he has had trouble sticking with his self-imposed ban, but that the campaign’s end had strengthened his resolve.

As a Twitter binger, I, too, had a similar impulse to question my commitment to the service after the election. It felt so insular, so time-consuming and yet so meaningless, too, in the grand scheme of things. It feels like time for detox. As they might say on Twitter (where people are fond of saying things in weird ways): What even are we doing here? And why can’t we stop?

Though Facebook is by far the larger and more consequential social network, Twitter functioned as this election cycle’s heartbeat. Just about every story that captivated the campaign either began on Twitter or got its viral energy there; a breaking news event wasn’t really a breaking news event until it was a tweet that could be passed around and commented on, and only then would it hit the wider online and television news circuit.