Several years ago when I was using Twitter more actively, I enrolled in a service called “paper.li.” It is an automated service that culls content from your Twitter feed, per your individual customizations. You can select which Twitter follower lists you have for it to cull, and other ways of determining content (I think). I thought, “This is cute, it might enhance the Twitter experience. I have my own newspaper!” I even had a clever name for it, “The Sober Catholic Trudge Report.” “Sober Catholic,” from the name of this blog and Twitter account, and “Trudge Report,” from the AA phrase “trudging the road to happy destiny” as well as a clever play on a popular news aggregate site.

It ended up being responsible for maybe 90+% of my Tweets, with blogposts another ~9% and actual original Tweets 1%. I decided long ago that Twitter wasn’t worth the hassle. I mean, 140 characters? What can you say with that? Mostly good for links and quick hit-and-run posts…

I discontinued the service today when I discovered it was irritating a Twitter user and follower of my @sobercatholic Twitter account. She, for her own reasons, didn’t like the service picking up her Tweets and adding them to the paper’s feed. Why, I don’t know, as Twitter is primarily for promotion, but for whatever reasons valid and appropriate for her, she didn’t want it and kept repeatedly asking me to stop. Unfortunately, I rarely use Twitter, don’t check my feed much at all, and so wasn’t aware of it until I just happened to login today and find out her consternation.

I decided that despite frequent retweets of the Trudge Report’s tweets by a number of people who appreciated it, it isn’t worth it. The lady’s irritation with me was compounded by the fact that my Twitter account is ignored by me, and for that reason I should have more control over what goes out over it. If I rarely use it, then an automated service shouldn’t either.

I do feel bad that she was irritated, and wish that I had noticed her requests sooner. I’m not sure how I could have eliminated her tweets from being picked up as I think I only logged in to customize paper.li twice since signing up, and so am not familiar with the full range of its functions. So, even if there was a way to just block her tweets from the Trudge Report’s feed, I’m not going to bother. Too late anyway as I’ve already deleted the account. Even in doing that, I had a heckuva time!

I am not going to identify her Twitter account in this post, but I do hope she somehow finds out about my sorrow over her irritation with me and that I meant no harm. It was just carelessness on my part due to my inattention to a social media account. (She has blocked me, and so won’t see anymore @sobercatholic tweets.)

This is, however, a development in the reassessment of my social media use I’ve done over the past few months. I’ll blog about that later. This is the longest I’ve had to deal with Twitter in Who knows how long, so I’m going outside. (A coincidence? I learned about this lady’s irritation with me only because I decided to use Twitter for an original tweet, “Going outside to get outside.” It’s a nice day out there and I wanted to go out and putter around. For no apparent reason I decided Twitter was the place to announce that, as if the world cares. 😉 )

Although I seriously doubt that anyone should be upset with my decision to terminate the Trudge Report, if anyone is, please get over it. It is no big deal, I didn’t read it myself and rarely thought of it. It was all automated, and I put no effort into it apart from logging in once or twice over the years and customizing the feed. I might have been able to just prevent it from picking up her tweets, but I didn’t care enough to find out how to do that. In a way, she did me a favor as I will take a look at my social media use overall, and consider what else is irrelevant. Today I deleted a twitter service responsible for most of my Tweets, I’ve also laregely ceased using Google Plus (I decided on that a few months ago.)

I’d better stop as I’m getting into that post I said I was going to write later…

My two other books are still available! "The Stations of the Cross for Alcoholics" and "The Recovery Rosary: Reflections for Alcoholics and Addicts" (Thank you!!)

I recently found out that Twitter has a follow limit of 2,000. That’s the maximum number of accounts that you can follow. So I decided to review who or what I’m following and “cull the herd,” so to speak.

I chose to trim my “recovery” list. As I am not a recovery professional, I decided to unfollow almost every treatment facility/detox center and the like. I have nothing against such places, they do great work with people. But if I were to make use of Twitter in the manner I’d prefer to use it, I’d just follow and interact with individuals. And so my recovery list is now filled with fellow people in recovery, with some exceptions for Catholic organizations and recovery media accounts. I know that I can add accounts to a list and not follow them, but there’s already too much noise and clutter online. Again, facilities do great work and are a critical need, but I cannot read everything that comes across a feed or timeline and so some restrictions are in order. Having multiple Twitter accounts only multiplies the problem.

I will look at other lists that I have used to organize my Twitter follows, and trim those as well. I may limit my Twitter follows to just people in recovery, writers of any stripe, (but preferably Catholic or involved in recovery), pro-lifers and those few people I consider online friends but I know only through Twitter (or perhaps elsewhere, but Twitter is an additional way to keep in touch with them).

I don’t have much personal use for Twitter; it exists mostly to promote the posts I write for this blog, and to a lesser extent, to connect with other people. The fact that Twitter limits you to 140 characters for any post renders the latter somewhat less than useful. I’m a writer and blogger, what can I do with 140 characters? Its user interface isn’t to me very helpful, anything that happened much longer than a few hours ago is basically lost to history. Twitter power users might point out that the use of lists can help along those lines, but due to what I said above, I have little interest in being a “power user.” I do make use of lists as I’ve indicated above, and they do help matters, but still, the limited nature of 140 characters dissuades me from making much use of the network. The 140 lends itself to shorter online attention spans, oh look! my cats are doing something cute.

My two other books are still available! "The Stations of the Cross for Alcoholics" and "The Recovery Rosary: Reflections for Alcoholics and Addicts" (Thank you!!)