I just nuked my Twitter feed (here’s how you can do the same)

I logged on to Twitter today and saw the usual: a hodgepodge of bad news, entitled moaning and social issues I have no choice but to care about. In five minutes, I had nuked it all.

To say this decision came out of nowhere is not really fair. I’ve been speaking to Graham about how draining I’ve begun to find the social platform, then last week there were two pieces I read that started the cogs turning. This piece by Cassey. And then this one on Medium: “Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn From It)“.

Twitter used to be my favourite place to hang out, but logging in had become the equivalent of walking into a very loud room, so loud that I was unable to hear myself think, then stumbling out feeling frazzled and grumpy. I think something that contributed to the problem was that I’ve changed industries so a lot of the shouting was just not relevant to me any more. Neither, I’m ashamed to say, were many of the people doing the shouting (I hadn’t spoken to some of them for over three years).

I put out a call into this very loud room for a weapon of mass destruction…

If I wanted to completely nuke who I was following on Twitter and start again, would there be a tool for that?

— Tallulah Habib (@tallulahlucy) October 19, 2015

And someone came back with this link.

The option I went with was so incredibly simple that I didn’t have time to re-think the move.

1. Go to your Following page on Twitter
2. Scroll down to the bottom
3. Hit CTRL+SHIFT+C
4. Go to the “console” tab
5. Paste in: $(‘.button-text.unfollow-text’).trigger(‘click’);

And then everyone was unfollowed.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I’m pretty sure some of the people who I re-followed were offended, thinking that the entire time we’d been Twitter BFFs I’d been secretly not following them. I’m also sure I missed some people as my following list has gone from 900 odd to about 120.

But you know what? It is liberating. It’s that “I just cut all my hair off and now I feel so free” feeling.

Long may it last.

Comments

comments