It started in spring 2014 when Alexandra Franzen, one of the writers I admire most, announced she quit Twitter. I was angry, almost offended, at the idea of life without Twitter. A bit of an overreaction. That was when I knew I had a problem. I felt compelled to reach out and ask what life without Twitter was like.
“A little withdrawal at first, and then… just a beautiful feeling of quiet,” she replied. “Like somebody finally fixed the noisy fridge that was always humming in the background of my mind. Oh. Right. THAT is what silence sounds like.”
That sounded incredible. A life with Twitter is a life constantly on edge, wondering what I’m missing out on every moment that I don’t refresh my feed. But it also sounded terrifying. According to Rescue Time, my time tracking app, I spend between one to two hours every day on Twitter. Seven to 14 hours a week. I tell myself it’s because I use Twitter to network, to keep up on the news, to find sources for articles. But really, I’m addicted to the endorphin rush I get everytime I see a retweet.
So it took something drastic to extract me from Twitter.
A little over a week ago, I published an article about the Bob Ross painting marathon on Twitch.tv. I wrote that Ross’s optimism appeared to be bringing positivity to what I observed was a profoundly unfriendly group. Like clockwork, and with no sense of irony, the messages began pouring in as Twitch users threatened to show me just how friendly the community could be.
This isn’t my first rodeo. I know that as soon as you engage with a troll, you lose. So I’ve made a habit of avoiding Twitter for a few hours after I publish something. It cuts down on the temptation to reply. But when I signed on again a day later, tweets I shouldn’t reply to were still coming. I figured this was exactly the push I needed to launch my Twitter-free experiment.
Let me emphasize this one more time—I was NOT driven off of Twitter by trolls. This was an active choice, not a passive reaction. I saw an opportunity to expand my normal post-publication routine into something more positive, and I took it.

from Forbes – Tech http://ift.tt/1WMynu6
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