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Don't QT this in lieu of replying please, I disabled replies for a reason.

I haven't been around this site much the last month or so, and mostly it's because I'm enjoying my life, keeping busy with work, projects, and of course my wonderful best friend (who, incidentally, I don't interact with much on twitter). I've done a deep dive into some really big work on SMRPG randomizer, among other things.

Moreover, I do not really enjoy the time I spend on twitter that much nowadays, but it acts as a fast paced and constant information stream that provides convenient and accessible relief for my short attention span, which sadly is too easy to fall into. Lately I've been deep-diving into SMRPG randomizer development and disciplining myself to not drift back to scrolling the TL. I still mostly believe that touting "delete your social media accounts" as a universally effective self-improvement measure is a bad meme that exposes less so a problem with the medium and moreso a problem with the speaker's attitude and self-discipline, but I do also try to recognize when I'm falling into unconstructive habits too often.

That being said, there are several things I kinda actually hate about being here. Specifically, I hate how transactional everything has become on twitter for many who spend a lot of time on it, and how people who have unhealthy relationships with this website are very loud about how far they let their imaginations run wild when searching for ulterior motives behind any little innocuous thing someone does or doesn't do.

I made my account in 2009, right around when I was finding it too cumbersome to maintain RSS readers across several computers, and eventually I followed enough people on here that it gave me a convenient one-stop place to briefly see what's going on right now in the places and communities I care about. This, consequently, is why I followback everyone who follows me (and therefore, the automatic reciprocated unfollows are to prioritize the mutuals, as twitter does limit your follows according to how many followers you have). I continued to primarily use my home feed as a news feed in that manner, where if you follow me, there's a pretty good chance we care about at least 1 similar thing. Therefore, if I want to see what's going on in spheres that matter to me, it makes sense to make that connection mutual. This ended up being a great way to make friends in the mid 2010s, and is pretty reflective of how I sought out people with similar esoteric interests to me at earlier stages in my life and stuck to them like glue.

This context matters to explain why I'm losing interest. The networking aspect of twitter is of little interest to me. I cannot force myself to put the same stock and emotional investment into every click of a button that happens on here the way you're almost expected to. I have never liked that some people are almost proud of the fact that their activism/solidarity begins and ends with the unfollow and block buttons, meanwhile, grassroots communitywide safety initiatives that need that same energy are met with little public support and simply a lot of Thoughts And Prayers from those who do state they love the idea. (For disclosure, I am on the FGCOC. I applied to be a Smash COC panelist before I knew they were disbanding. I have entirely too many projects on my plate on top of just recently recovering from a debilitating long-term illness, but wanted to put my skills somewhere they could be useful to somthing I believed in.)

This is a sibling symptom, stemming from the same root cause, of another problem I have with Twitter as a community, being that there's unwritten rules that you're expected to follow by people who want to play detective with your every inconsequential move once you pass a quite charitably evaluated follower threshold, that I just frankly don't care to learn or adhere by. I don't even really know how I ended up with a few thousand followers, considering I don't do much to try and attract people to my page besides the occasional shitpost getting a bunch of RTs, have little concern for personal branding, and it confuses me on the odd occasion someone expresses surprise that I followed them. I mostly just live my life doing the things that interest me at the time and trying to contribute to projects and assist people with whatever unique talent I feel I can offer. I don't think I'm anything exceptional, and I mean that in a positive way - I'm just really a pretty average person who likes to learn stuff, tries be a positive force in the lives of those who connect with me, and shares the things that make me happy. I don't always get it right, but I'm sufficiently happy with myself and my primary drivers, and I don't aspire to be anything more than how I already see myself.

There is rarely any deeper meaning to anything I do, online or otherwise, this is pretty much all there is to me. I generally operate under the assumption that anything I say to anyone could be leaked at any time, so even behind closed doors I don't say things to anyone about anyone else that would give me foot-in-mouth disorder in the event of, say, a massive discord security breach and chat log dump, or whatever, happening. I try, even if I don't always succeed, to be careful, thoughtful, and nuanced with my words, and fair to people, when I'm treading sensitive ground, whether in public or private. I don't really do stuff that can't be taken at face value, and I'd be pretty fucking horrible at it if I tried. I'm not a mind-reader, and I don't expect anyone else to be one with me, which is also why I feel bad for people who invest significant time and energy into this place but like to pretend they totally don't care about it when that over-investment contributes to making unnecessary mountains out of extremely minor transgressional molehills. What an exhausting way to live.

So, to elaborate, a problem I have is that I don't like the idea of being seen and treated as a means to an end, which is a problem that has only gotten worse over time. I don't like the idea that there may be people who keep me around for self-assurance or insurance reasons because of my (unimpressive, really) follower count and good community standing. And I don't like being seen as a platform more than a person. Signal boosting something that catches my eye is one thing, and I like to say what's on my mind if I feel it hasn't already been said ad nauseam yet. But, for example, I never again want to be expected to, or approached with a request to, go and make some public statements about feuds that I have zero stake in and feel deeply uncomfortable having to know anything about in the first place. Almost any time I've logged in over the last month I've caught wind of the Next Big Community Fallout and then just close the app before anyone can demand I do something outside my boundaries to satisfy someone else's arbitrarily moralized expectations. I don't think I really fit in on a platform where so many people are so obsessed with "clout" (seriously, add it to your muted words list) and it's all anyone ever fucking talks about, it's the default motive to assume when anyone does literally anything (far more often than is actually true), which doesn't jive at all with how I've intended to use this site the last 12 years. This even happens to people who apply to join fucking community COC panels, trying to do something to help the community, where their names are not even published, still being accused of "clout chasing" by people whose entire idea of activism begins and ends at announcing "don't worry everyone, I unfollowed so and so! that'll show em!"

Twitter is not a social capital chess game to me, I am not interested in playing Six Degrees Of Separation From Satan, and I am not cut out for playing these games with those to whom it's a modus operandi more than it is a game. This is also why I prefer to speak about these things as summarized collections of experiences and observations rather than as pointless childish subtweeting about individuals. This place is just a snowflake resting at the very top of the tip of the iceberg that is human behaviour and interaction, and it's saddening to me how people let their understanding of relationships, personal growth, and especially community safety become more and more myopic and stunted as they're reframed entirely to the scope of how interactions work on a microblogging website. Too much obsession with this place is unhealthy, and I don't want to let myself fall into this trap of being unable to conceptualize human beings as complete persons outside of their presence on one website. I hate meta-twitter, but it's impossible to avoid once you invest enough time into the platform, and despite this, such a framework continues to feel alien to me. I hate how cynical and suspicious it's beginning to make me of people (in general) that I share this space with, when I'm normally someone who assumes the best of everyone and tries to find something positive and valuable in every person who gives me the time of day.

On that last point, I've pretty much always been this way, for my entire life, almost to a fault considering how it's gotten me burned enough times. This is in large part shaped by my upbringing, my spiritual/religious beliefs, and because of traumatic and difficult personal experiences I've had with certain people, some of whom remain deeply important to me. I will not be expanding on the details of this, but one of the logical conclusions of me calibrating my moral compass this way is that it is extremely difficult for me to force myself to stop caring about anyone I meet and have a positive experience with, no matter how brief or long ago it was. In the early 2010's I thought that things like Facebook friends list purge announcements were strange and didn't understand them, because I can't imagine myself pointing to any individual I've ever cared about and thinking "actually, I don't care about them now", the concept is just completely foreign to me and makes me feel uneasy. It feels to me like I'm committing a heinous transgression if I choose to disregard any value in a person with whom I've shared any kind of history. A way this personality trait manifests itself is that I privately encourage people who ask me for it to be their best selves, climb out of a negative hole they've dug, and become a benign force in the world at worst. It's important to me to bear witness to that transformation, for anyone who feels like they've done wrong and then thinks of me as someone who they can turn to, even if we're not close, for honest guidance or feedback in a way that doesn't have to be a staged public affair for fake internet points. This is a role that I more-than-sometimes end up having in people's lives, even if we're otherwise almost never in touch. At the same time, I volunteer my free time to code of conduct initiatives which would outline processes for banning some of those same people from events, because I don't think you have to defend someone or make excuses for them in order to care about them and want to help them get off that path. For these reason, my connections to other people that can be publicly traced can also be assumed to have no imaginative insidious implications - even with people I've cared about in some capacity whose actions I'm disappointed in and otherwise have basically no regular contact, I've always felt a duty to leave at least one bridge unburned, because I don't want to deny that lifeline before I can even be approached for it. My sense of right and wrong has always been exactly as I've presented it, but going total scorched earth on just about anyone, -for me-, feels like an actively bad decision, and -for me- to do so would just be an empty performance that I don't believe in.

(It is worth noting that I vehemently disagree with most other "kill em with kindness" types who advocate for this as the One True Approach when engaging wrong-doers, as I think only people privileged enough to stomach playing that role should do so, and at their own behest. Severing interpersonal connections is a consequence that communicates severity, which is an equally valid and important choice, and I think anyone who's done something terrible needs to experience both to truly understand the gravity of their actions. I am more suited to the former role, but you will never catch me out here scolding and preaching that everyone else should follow suit. I would never suggest that others should have to compromise their own boundaries just to humour someone else's theories of how redemption works.)

However, I'm more understanding now that Twitter, and especially Twitch, is not the correct place to facilitate those connections. These platforms are not primarily intended to be private settings that can act as an avenue for what I've stated, so the wires become crossed when people who don't feel safe around specific individuals are forced to unwittingly be exposed to them by virtue of this platform primarily functioning as a network. I don't like that this is the reality, but I have to acknowledge that it is, that not all interactions are appropriate even with benign intentions, and act accordingly. I am a proponent of restorative justice and a firm believer that nobody can grow when they're alone (or worse, surrounded only by people who actively validate destructive actions), but my presence in a community cannot act as an extension of said community for those who've been otherwise ousted and haven't done the time, so to speak, to remain an active member of. I do not want my stream-of-consciousness posting to act as a proxy for my mutuals to have unexpected exposure to people they rightfully do not feel safe sharing a community with when they're just trying to browse the TL and read something I put on said TL. As a result, in the near future, I will likely block or softblock some active individuals who others may feel unsafe around due to any number of well-known allegations, especially those that have been strongly corroborated, as I become aware of them. This may also come in the form of chat bans as I gear up to stream more regularly in 2021 now that I've mostly recovered from ongoing health issues.

That being said, I'm likely not gonna be as active here in the future. I'm not quitting or deactivating, I've just got other things to do and a happy and fulfilling life that I want to spend more time living, and distractions in the form of a platform with a social meta that I find exhausting and counterproductive aren't helping me accomplish those things. As in, I'm not really into using Twitter as a live feed of every thought that enters my brain anymore, but will probably still post stuff I really want to share with people. Twitter isn't all bad, the friends I have on here are great, and there's other places I can be found too. It's just the overwhelmingly negative aspects of the social climate in the extended networks that exist on here that I'm pretty much over and de-investing from. It's been getting to me lately how even when working from home and having more free time in the day, I'm still not as far along as I want to be with the things I want to accomplish before re-committing to daily commitments like streaming and practicing languages and music, so absorbing myself into the twittersphere is a time commitment I think would be extremely beneficial to mostly cut out. Thanks for understanding. Once again, don't QT this in lieu of replying please, I disabled replies for a reason.