Because I can :-)
I was going to write a longer post about this but it is pretty much irrelevant. Essentially I have been thinking about this over the past weeks given that my character might be somewhat incompatible with what I want to achieve next. Sunday I got locked out of Twitter because some random asshole made an harassment complaint because I called him “dumb fuck” and “dumb idiot”, pretty normal things around my feed.
This was the spark to act on my thoughts. Jack is a pathetic leader and Twitter is an unfixable shitshow. Twitter (and other social networks) are effectively making the world a worse place. Twitter rules are assymetric or arbitrary if you prefer. When Twitter allows Trump to bypass its rules (excused by some weird public interest or whatever) but is happy to enforce rules against anyone else then rules are irrelevant. It’s not just Trump, the Nazi and misinformation problems are bigger and Twitter doesn’t really want to solve them. And that kind of platform is not interesting anymore.
Besides that, while I love all the amount of information I retrieve out of Twitter it’s not the most efficient way to do it. My (daily) wasted screen time is ridiculous and so it’s time to kill that inneficiency. I just want all those interesting links and a bot is way more efficient.
And Twitter is not anymore a platform for discussions (if it ever was). It’s mostly unidirectional flow of “ideas” and rage. 280 characters aren’t enough for any meaningful discussion and exposing thoughts, but they are good for quick escalation. Guilty as charged - should have ignored that dumb fuck instead of calling him dumb fuck ;-).
Anyway, it were almost 10 years of a fun experiment. I wiped all my Twitter history because it felt liberating (and because it’s scary when you look at your Twitter data and you have almost 10 years of all kinds of things you said and thought). Contrary to what the developer documentation says, the destroy API isn’t rate limited. Took some 6 hours to delete 72.5k tweets but at least it wasn’t rate limited. Why there isn’t a delete all API is another fine example of how crap Twitter leadership is. If you are into Go (I’m doing Go in 2020, change is good!) then go-twitter worked pretty well for me.
I am around at the usual places. I am not going away. Now I got extra free time to get back to fun stuff.
Hummm this might have ended up longer than I thought but shorter than initial ideas. That’s the advantage of no character limitations :P.
fG!