2024
- I deleted my tweet history in 2016. I didn’t want my archive on a site that I didn’t control.
- I left Twitter in 2017. Micro.blog showed up and I knew I wanted to only write on my own site.
- Twitter was a failed company.
- I removed all my connections, destroying my “network” on Twitter.
- I thanked Elon when he dropped the Twitter brand and made it X. I have no brand affinity to X.
Tammy and I went to the sold out 7 Nights in the Entry at the Parkway Theater, part of the Sound Unseen 25th Annual Film festival. Chris Strouth of Twin/Tone, Greg Norton of Hüsker Dü, and Rick Fuller introduced it. This was only the seond showing ever!
RIP @thingles
The steps…
When I joined Twitter in December 2006 as user 82,903 it was fun and new. It was an open platform with a lot of experimentation. Twitter clients were super innovative. I remember posting via SMS! The creation of “retweets” by the community before the platform figured it out.
But the fun turned sour over years. I don’t believe there is a good form of social media. It isn’t the logo on the front or who is running it. It is the fundamental thing. It is addictive software patterns and amplification of engaging content with no regard for our health or wellbeing.
I honestly can’t think of an innovative new thing to come from social media in the last several years. It isn’t about the product anymore, it is just marketing.
So in November 2024, it was time to cut the last vestige of social media I had. It was time to delete my Twitter X profile. I had destroyed everything else I had on that site but had left my profile there. The only utility of that was to hold my username. But I don’t want any connection to these networks. It isn’t about the brand. I believe they all end up in the same place. There is no healthy cigarette. No good form of gambling.
By way of this post please be aware that any content or information that may appear on X is absolutely not from me.
I had some fun with ChatGPT and the image this conjured up for me.
How I’m handling Twitter embeds from deleted accounts
I’m seeing a lot of people that I was connected with on Twitter X deleting their profiles. This actually ends up having an impact on my blog because of embeddings. When I left Twitter years ago I exported my archive and imported it into my blog. Over the years I’ve merged that content in as “native” as I can. The reality is that Twitter status updates are often very different than a blog post.
There were a number of retweets that I did that I also migrated. When I did those I used Hugo’s ability to embed a Tweet using a shortcode. That results though in build errors if those Tweets become unavailable. I get an error that looks like this (I anonymized the identifiers).
Error: ERROR Failed to get JSON resource "https://publish.twitter.com/oembed?dnt=false&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fusername%2Fstatus%2F123456789123456": Failed to retrieve remote file: Forbidden, body: "{\"error\":\"Sorry, you are not authorized to see this status.\",\"request\":\"\\/oembed?dnt=false&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fusername%2Fstatus%2F123456789123456\"}"
I debated how to approach this and decided that I would delete my references to these as well. That seems like the best way to honor the original authors intent. They deleted that content themselves. The result is that I’ve deleted several historical posts on my blog in recent days as people have deleted their accounts on X. Mostly those posts had no meaningful content from me.
Tammy and I went to A Real Pain tonight. I thought it was fine and a bit boring. The reviews say it is “powerfully funny” which I didn’t get at all. It also seemed odd that [Kieran Culkin](Kieran Culkin)’s character behavior seemed so similar to Roman Roy. 🤷♂️
Dig the cool display design for the Minnesota Tekne Awards stage. Fun to see the displays in a non-traditional layout that is connected to the imagery.
Wrapping up Growth Summit #TeamSPS did a Give Back event where we assembled 1,000 SolarBuddy lights. Impact 4 Good led the team through the exercise. The lights were pretty simple to assemble yet cool to see how they functioned.
Incredible morning building connections at SPS Growth Summit! Incredible keynote from Riaz Meghji! So much great energy and talent as we continue to grow the world’s retail network.#TeamSPS
Last night we finished watching Season 7 of Young Sheldon. We watched this show mostly as a family, except Mazie mostly being off to college. It didn’t warm to me right away, which is true for most TV shows. But over time I came to really like it. Will miss these characters!
