It's been a while since I last posted on this blog. I've been travelling, and also interviewing for a new job; I'll have more to say about that in the future. Now that things have settled down a bit, I intend to start blogging more again.
Aside from that, I intend to start spending less time on Twitter. I've long been in a love/hate relationship with Twitter, and the hate side of it is starting to win out, for a variety of reasons:
There is just too little signal to noise on it. For every one thing that interests me, I see twenty that don't.
I feel I'm getting a lot of negativity from it lately. I already know the world is in a terrible state; being reminded of it constantly in 280-character doses isn't really adding anything to my life. And the trending topics, oh, the trending topics.
It is addictive. I've been opening Twitter several times a day, for very little gain. I would be much better off if I spent all the time I currently spend on Twitter and Reddit reading Wikipedia (or books, for that matter), or learning German, instead.
Mastodon isn't much better. It does not have some of Twitter's misfeatures, such as trying to push a non-chronological timeline onto users, and it has the advantages of being decentralized and community-oriented, but the experience is very similar to that of Twitter. I think these problems are related to the media of microblogging, rather than a specific platform.
Traditional blogs can be addictive too. I follow hundreds of blogs via RSS, and sometimes I feel like refreshing my feeds every now and then to see if there is something new. But blog posts typically take more time to write, so updates are not so frequent, so the incentive to keep refreshing them several times a day is not so strong. It's also easier to keep track of unread posts and read them at a later time. Finally, blog posts tend to be much more informationally nutritious than tweets or toots.
At the same time I start to use Twitter less, I would like to start posting more here. I still have to figure out what to do with content that seems too short for a blog post – for example, if I just want to share a link to a video, or a little command I learned. One solution is to accumulate those and post them in weekly installments. Another is just to go ahead and post short posts, but I don't really want to pollute the blog with a plethora of micro-posts. Yet another is to create a separate page for the micro-posts. I'm currently more inclined towards the first option.
That's it, folks. Have a nice week!
> And the trending topics, oh, the trending topics.
I literally use an uBlock Origin rule to block the trending topics. Twitter life is so much better this way.
@Emmanuelle: This is genius. It never occurred to me to do that. What I ended up doing instead was changing my trending topics location to a calmer place.
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Hurraaaay, 2020-08-01 20:12:09 +0200 #
SHORT POSTS :D:D:D/o/\o\\o/