[vcg3rd]

Started using Twitter in 2006. [Long story] Quit around 2017. Privacy Badger extension blocks embeds. Used to allow occasionally until I noticed it was never worth it and finally stopped reading "news" sites that were sentence|tweet|s|t etc.

Used Nitter for a while for the reason many do: to see that 1 tweet or thread that sounds interesting. Realized it either wasn't or was a little FOMO.

When I was a kid if you missed a good movie in theaters you had to wait years to see it on TV. I've started returning to that mentality. If it's genuinely good enough and interesting enough it will turn up somewhere eventually or I'll just miss out.

I can't number the people who have told me I must subscribe to AppleTV to watch some Ted show no one talks about any more. I always said: "No. It will turn up on some platform I use or come out on Blu-ray or I'll just never see it." For all I know it's on Blu-ray already. I forgot about it until just now it's been so long since I must watch.

[troad]

> If it's genuinely good enough and interesting enough it will turn up somewhere eventually or I'll just miss out.

Waiting a few years for the marketing to die down, the hype to move on, and the dust to settle has served me well. Time is an amazing filter of quality.

Twitter is a FOMO based product. What if you miss the latest announcement about some important breaking research development? What then?! You'll be behind! You'll have missed the bus! It's not like you can just wait five hours for the announcement to be reported on- oh wait.

And how often does that actually happen? Virtually nothing on Twitter has a shelf-life of more than one news cycle, which is reason enough not to waste time on it. The signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter is abysmal, and has gotten much, much worse in the last five years.