For years, I’ve stemmed the tide of Twitter’s algorithmic poison by using @tweetbot to keep things chronological and focused.

@tweetbot made Twitter tolerable but – like any native app – too available. You know the drill: any spare moment, out comes the phone.

So I took @tweetbot off all my devices and am now at the mercy of Twitter’s algorithms. And friends, it feels like the beginning of the end.

I now end Twitter visits at first sight of a reductive character assassination from someone I don’t even follow. Visits tend to be short.

Twitter is now mostly write-only for me. My feed is too junked up to read anymore. Whatever FOMO I still have can’t abide the algorithms.

I’m off Facebook. I use Instagram and Twitter begrudgingly. The only social network I actually like is @letterboxd. How long will that last?

I guess it was naive to think asynchronous friendships could work at scale and/or be compatible with a business model that does no harm.

It’s just fucked up that the reason we don’t disengage is we don’t know how to operate on the outside anymore. Like a convict facing parole.

Of the first 50 tweets in my Twitter feed this morning, 18 were from accounts I follow. All but three were more than an hour old.