Nick's Random Gibberish (20) : I'm Breaking Up With Twitter

Nick's Random Gibberish is a weekly post here at Nick's Book Blog where I, Nick, will talk about random topics from personal posts to discussion posts.

Yes, the title says it all. I'm breaking up with Twitter and I think it's the best decision for me. 

When I first joined Twitter back in 2012, I loved it. Over the past few years, Twitter and the blogging community specifically, has morphed into something that I'm not really happy with. Twitter used to be all about promoting your blog posts and getting to know the people behind the blogs. It was a great place for discussions and just a pleasant way to get to know bloggers better and make new friends and discover new blogs in the process. 

As some of you know, I took a one week blogging break last week and I only logged onto Twitter a couple of times during the break. I was surprised that I didn't miss it more. I got back from my break and realized how I actually did not care for Twitter or tweeting anymore. There's no longer that personal touch that used to be there. My feed is overwhelmed with tweets about wanting this or that ARC (I've already discussed this before, but this community is OBSESSED with ARCs and wanting all the hyped ARCs and that is clearly visible on Twitter - I'm not even kidding when I say half of my feed is constantly talking about ARCs), books for trade (which I thought was a good idea at first, but I'm pretty sick and tired of seeing it all over my feed now. I just think a website or a forum of some sort is much better suited for this), book giveaways for hyped titles to get as many followers as possible (I'm guilty of this too, but I realized how pointless it was after I lost like 30 followers as soon as the giveaway ended. I want people to follow because they think I'm an interesting person which is unlikely because I'm very uninteresting - haha), blogger drama or this new repulsive and greedy behavior of begging authors and publishers (what comes across as ass-kissing) for books on Twitter and whining about not getting certain books to them (FYI, this is NOT professional. If you want to request a book, do it via email and no need to act so dramatic when you can't get an ARC. The book will eventually come out.). 

I guess this was to be expected. As this community grew, all the negative parts of it for me also grew. There are days I wonder why I'm still part of the book blogging community. I'm not ready to leave it just yet, but it's one of the few things that help keep me sane (and also because Nereyda threatened me not to). I get that this is very much of a personal issue because not many people seem to be bothered by this as much as I am. It's just that I miss actually TALKING to people on Twitter as opposed to all these tweets that aren't very personal.  I doubt this is going to change anytime soon, so I think it's best that I phase it out of my blogging life slowly because it's certainly not making me happy. I didn't exactly have that much of a presence to begin with because of school, but now just logging onto my Twitter feed makes me ragey from time to time and that's just sad. I don't know how this is going to affect my blog viewership. I'm still going to be posting pre-scheduled links to my reviews via Tweetdeck, but I'm not going to have much of a presence on there. A lot of my favorite bloggers haven't always been very active on Twitter which gives me hope that my blog itself won't be as affected by my absence. I just think this is the best decision for me.

If you're someone that I regularly chat with on Twitter and if you're still interested in chatting with me, send me your Whatsapp or Google Chat contact info. That's how I'm currently maintaining my friendships with some bloggers. 

What are your thoughts on the changes in the tweets you're seeing? Are you happy with the changes? 

Share your thoughts in the comments below.