On an off-hand comment by my partner I decided to remove Twitter from my phone and see how things went. I was never terminally online with Twitter in the way that some folks are but I was an avid consumer of the content on there. It's a hazard of the tech industry. So many people are on Twitter posting interesting things it makes it hard to walk away from professionally and still keep up with the industry. That said even tech twitter is filled with a lot of the garbage we've come to expect from social media in general and the brain rot is present none the less.

After the first couple weeks I'd honestly say that deleting the app off my phone has been really good. I find myself checking it very infrequently and feel better for it. Though this feeling better is more like "a lack of feeling like shit" than feeling positively above the baseline. I just don't get moments ruined by reading something inflammatory on twitter and focusing on that instead of the important things in life directly in front of me. 

From a tech industry perspective I still don't know what my solution to staying up to date on the goings on in the industry will be. Hacker News is an option as well as routinely checking with the tech news sites (Ars Technica, Tech Crunch, etc) but none of it has felt quite right yet.

I think some of the "not quite right" is coming from the delayed and polished nature of the information coming from the news sties. Many times these articles are regurgitations of what happened on Twitter and that feels, weird somehow. Comments on journalism aside, this regurgitation of twitter might actually be a good thing for what I'm trying to do. It means that I'm getting the same information, a little delayed, but without having to be in the slums of Twitter myself. Honestly who cares if I get the information a bit late. Most of what's good about tech twitter isn't the immediacy of it. If it's something worth knowing, it's something worth knowing for longer than 30 seconds.

Anyway--less Twitter and less social media in general is a good thing. It's better for you to literally watch paint dry instead of scrolling twitter so try that sometime.