De-Musking in the New Year

Welcome to 2023! With every new year, I reflect on the past year — what I liked and disliked and then ponder how I would like to change things for the upcoming year.

Often, I find removing “noise” from my life is part of what changes. This lets me focus more on what matters and get less distracted by everything else. In the tech world over the last year, there has been endless drama with Elon Musk and Twitter. I am done with it. He is not someone I want to support or feed. A company is more than one person, but the leader sets the tone.

So, I am dropping Twitter and deactivating my account. The funny thing is that it is less about Elon’s direct drama and more about quality. I started using Twitter over fifteen years ago, in August 2007. At first, it was fun and new. There were more individual conversations. These days, I find it too full of influencers spouting off this or that. Or endless tweets about the top ten facts about this or that — and I click on all of them. I have to know! The quality has gone down, and the execution is choppy. And I find it has all gotten worse since Elon Musk acquired it. Anyway, I’m out, and we’ll see how it goes.

GrepBeat and Jurassic Capital actively use their Twitter accounts, so I don’t see that stopping anytime soon. Also, the JoeBotBot Twitter account is full of inspirational quotes that are automatically tweeted every morning. I may kill that someday, but I’ll likely let that run until the code breaks with some API change.**

I quit Facebook ten years ago, and life has been better for it. Hopefully, the same will be here. I am still on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Reddit, so I’ll still have those to distract me.

P.S. I bought a Tesla Model S back in August 2013. I’ll be selling that car this year, too. The car has been (mostly) nice, but the service has been awful. I won’t be buying another one. That’ll put the final nail into my personal Elon coffin.