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Comment by _Algernon_ | Hacker News Reader

Or alternatively, stop supporting user hostile sites and take this opportunity to break your addiction. Touch some grass, so to speak.

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Yup. I think more people need to admit to themselves that this is an addiction. When Twitter started going sideways in ways I find politically unacceptable (I have trans people in my family) I started using Mastodon. But of course, on Mastodon people would still link back to "the birdsite" and I'd gradually gravitate back to it more and more until I'd let my Twitter usage go back to normal, because realistically that's still where all the action is. Just out of habit.

It's really easy to let these habits control you.

The recent mayhem has given me another opportunity to try at a clean break.

I know what you mean. I fully deleted my 11 year old twitter account, and now I get almost frustrated enough to make a new one whenever I click on a HN news web article that links to twitter for context :/

I've been wondering if it's better to delete my account or just stop using it.

Deleting my account doesn't destroy my data, everything still exists, it's just not visible to me anymore. But deletion allows someone else to use my handle.

I've put mine private. Then nobody can steal the name, and the lack of engagement eliminates the temptation to use it much.

I'm not addicted to twitter at all, my last tweet was a decade ago, but yeah a lot of people link interesting stuff there, doesn't mean I'm addicted to it

This. These hacks only last until they're plugged and are generally a waste of time publicizing.

That may be the idea here, if one wanted to bamboozle the site into stopping search engines from indexing them.

I heard yesterday that they already blocked googlebot and got delisted, but I didn't confirm, and I guess that was false.

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