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Comment by donohoe | Hacker News Reader

This is neat but I choose not to do this when it was clear the API allowed it. I was on Twitter for over 17 years and I think 99% of what I posted is useless and not noteworthy.

I welcome the blank slate that Bluesky provides.

View on HN

Incidentally, I'm kind of surprised or maybe dissapointed that people want to move onto an alternative after being on what seems like a largely pointless platform from probably their teens well into their 30s or equivalent timespan. It's nice to have a clean break and let the past be the past when it comes to social media. When Facebook died, I was quite happy to just let my account rot, checking in occasionally to see if I got any messages from my Gen X relatives or whatever. When I first deleted my Twitter account, I used the 't' cli and their built-in export to backup my account in case I ever wanted to re-activate it, and the urge has never come up. I'm still on Instagram but barely post, it's just brainrot, I'll let it die when it dies. Proor to deleting the Twitter account nearly 10 damn years ago, I'd been convincing myself it was useful, so much so that I'd be a pariah if I weren't on there, but I realized I didn't need any of it, and tossed it away. Much like high school friends, it seems important to let life carry on without dragging all the baggage of past me along for the ride.

I hear you. I certainly post much less and am happier for that. I like the emerging community there but I’m nowhere near as absorbed.

I was on Twitter briefly despite knowing better. It was great to connect with fellow programmers doing creative things, and having blocked the sidebar and all political hashtags, it was a net positive for a while. Ultimately though, it incentivizes people to post every "clever" thought that pops into their brains, and after posting hundreds of your own clever thoughts and reading tens of thousands of other people's, it instills in one the urge to live alone in the mountains under a vow of silence.

Though… it occurs to me that my cursed "cleverness" may have followed me to HN.

Ya, I followed a similar path; it quickly became something habitual, and I realized that I couldn't avoid the preachy political crap from even people I would otherwise probably align with. It felt like I was chronically checking it, and nearly always being bombarded with messaging about what I was supposed to be mad about that day, whereas if I'd not been on the platform I probably wouldn't have regularly fluctuation intense emotions about irrelevant issues.

HN is kind of a bad habit, but it's just a forum to me, I don't follow people, people aren't following me, I don't need to be signup up in order to find out what's going on in municipal government, it's just discourse about common interests if that's what I want. I can get a weekly digest and I know that's quite enough if that's the relationship I want to have with it, and everyone sees the same content.

I agree, that's how I feel exactly about both forums. My cleverness-on-HN remark was auto-referring to my cheeky vow-of-silence comment, which I felt proud of while writing and then a little stupid about while posting ;)

I like the blank slate analogy. I'm in the same boat.

I have tens of thousands of tweets (why, oh why) but personally have no desire to move them over. I realize that's important for some people. For me, it's enough to just download the archive and save it somewhere, in case I ever need to reference it again.

I have been deleting my tweets every year anyway.

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