The half life of a bad habit.
It’s been about a week and a half since I deleted my Twitter account and logged out of Facebook. Twitter/X gives you a full 30 days before the account disappears completely, just in case you want to reverse your decision. Only once or twice have I felt the urge to check a few lists I used to keep there. And the urge passed pretty quickly when I remembered how frustrating—and infuriating—those check-ins could be.
Oddly enough, though, Facebook has been more of a challenge to step away from. I’m not sitting here constantly itching to log on, but I've noticed that whenever I sit down to work, my first instinct when I'm tempted to procrastinate, is to check Facebook. Which is strange—I’ve always fucking hated Facebook. I was much more of a Twitter guy. Maybe it's because Twitter is gone now. In a few weeks, it’ll be deleted entirely, and there’s no going back. Plus it helps that Musk turned it into a dumpster fire of fascist incel ragebait.
But it’s like my fingers still want to type ‘Facebook’ into the search bar whenever I'm looking for a quick distraction. I wonder how long that reflex will stick.
The only reason I keep my Facebook account is that it’s my one reliable way to stay in touch with a few family members and friends scattered around the world—people who don’t share my obsession with getting out of toxic information systems. I don’t even use it for ads since I got banned from advertising a couple of years ago.
I’d love to delete it along with the dead bird site, but I don’t feel that I can. At least I don’t think about it much. The urge to check in comes over me only when I’m trying to avoid work. The rest of the time, I don’t think about it much.
But man, I’d love to know when the itch will go.
I used the old twitter for great contacts with knowledgeable people like scientists and other interesting fields. Ones that you could reach out to with questions about sciency 'stuff' and that they'd post interesting content every now and again. Then covid happened opening up the pandoras box of crazy and all the paranoia that came with it, and i left it behind. The temptation is to log in before the 30 days, but once it hits the point of no return its like a weight lifted and you pretty much dont think of it again. Interestingly it looks like threads may have picked up what twitter was. I still use IG and meta do some sneaky cross promotion in that feed "blah blah who you follow just joined threads", or "blah who you know posted this in threads" but only show a part of the comment.
I'm resisting, but dog its hard. I keep telling myself that its most probably a dumpster fire like pre-covid twitter was and i only see the shiny stuff they want me to see "COME JOIN US. ITS WARM OVER HERE. AND NOT WARM BECAUSE THE DUMPSTER IS ON FIRE. ITS THE WARMTH OF HEARTS, YEAH HEARTS, HEARTS THAT ARE DEFINITELY NOT ON STAKES OVER THE FIRE BUT BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE NICE AND INTELLIGENT WHO USE THIS PLATFORM". Not falling for that one again zuck.