The same with Facebook. For me, it was more painfull to quit facebook (no caps needed) than the big "T".

RSS Feeds.  https://feedly.com is a good way to read them.

I have the opposite problem - I'm meant to go on it often to try to network and engage with people in my field, but I always forget or I just go on for 5 mins and think, "eh, I can't be bothered to read all these tweets and like and reply, etc." so I just close it.

The sooner Twitter dies, the better. It's the perfect platform for reductive and negative comments, and impossible to have a nuanced, intelligent discussion on it. It's the worst of the internet.

I originally created a Twitter account as a cheap way to get more visibility, to "market" my things. Now I argue with people I don't even know, and I can feel my opinions becoming less and less nuanced.

I think this eMail address should now show my pic...?

I quit Facebook and Twitter over a year ago. Do not miss them one bit!  At first I though i'd miss the connections I had with people from my past. But then I realized, pre social media,  these people would have faded out of my life long ago. For good reason too! I have nothing in common with them anymore other than we shared some time at some point in the distant past.  The people I really care about I can call or text any time I want.

Dunno about Twitter, but Facebook quite literally ruined my life.

I'm curious Ron : as you know it, social media and communtiy management are very important for indie devs to promote their games (especially if they're not very well known and/or didn't made lots of games yet). Once you'll have a new game to promote, will you go back to Twitter (and other big social media)? Will you delegate this task to a community manager? What's your advice for indies who don't have budget to hire communty managers but still want to expose their game to players and press via social media ?

Thanks a lot for your answer, Ron.

Fun fact : I've read (on Twitter) that Reddit brings way more players and sales (5 to 10 times) than Twitter (my own experience during my KS campaign and some conversations with other devs lead to the same conclusion). I guess the best way to manage yourself a social media presence would be to post some GIFs and screenshots and go away as soon as it's published - but the tentation to hang out, read some tweets and procrastinate is very high (I plead very guilty on this). After all, social media are design to suck all your attention :/

I guess Twitter is different for "famous" people. I'm a nobody and I never really argue with anyone on Twitter and no one knows I even exist, so no one would ever think of selecting me as a target for trolling or whatever. I use Twitter pretty much like a feed reader. I follow a couple of news sites and people who do interesting stuff and that's it. When I do go check out Twitter, I literally just read the news and I'm done.

Never had a Facebook Account and don't even understand why anyone would use it. It's worthless to me.

Amen!

I find what works best for me is: i don't follow people that are constantly negative or especially outraged based. I try to follow artists and creators that are generally positive and post cool things from their projects. You control what you pull into your life via Twitter through the people you follow. This made Twitter a much more pleasurable experience for me overall. For indies trying to start or build a brand I think they have to be on Twitter, just in case. You need to build a following and fans and have a constant easily accessible platform to tell people to wishlist your game every few days.

Yes. I should do that too...

Not a native speaker, so please pardon my English.

I think the problem is more widespread, social networks are absolutely the worst part of the internet right now. They are designed to keep you scrolling the feed, and they create addiction, but the issue about reduced learning performance is deep linked with the internet, or better the WWW, in general. This is the catch, the Internet opened us quite literally an infinite source of information, information that we can retrieve at the speed of light, but on the other side having too much information is a big distraction for our brain.

There are studies showing the connection between pages with a lot of hyperlinks, sounds and videos, and lower learning rates. Our brain is not well suited for this, but our brain is also very malleable and the Internet is changing it. We are becoming less intelligent because we have a computer and the internet remembering and retrieving the information for us, it is just our brain adapting to this new input. This is the same thing that kept happening for centuries in the past; try to think about maps or clocks; before the invention of the map people had  better understanding of their surroundings because they had to orientate them self with their eyes and instinct, and in modern days with GPS we've just increased the Gap we started in the past. Same for the clock, our brain adapted so well that often time you eat your lunch because is noon and not because you are hungry. Before clock's invention people followed a more natural cycle, regulating them self with the sun rising and setting.

Other studies showed the connection between having hard time finishing a long book and the internet. It never happened to you? When I was younger I could finish a book in few days, now it took much, much longer(also taking in account life changes like family, kids, etc). Why? Because internet is changing our brain, the information it provides are often short and approximate and you can easily lose yourself in a forest of hyperlinks on connected material.
So, is internet bad for us? Hard to tell, if the human species keeps thriving probably not, we could become more and more connected with our machines and that will let us to be more "intelligent" and fast. But, if our society fails or collapse for any reasons we could awake from our interconnected dream and found out we are dumber than in the past.

If you want to deepen on this subject, I suggest you to read these books:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9778945-the-shallows

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36696533-new-dark-age

I've never used Twitter, nor have I ever had the desire to join. Good for you for quitting! I just bought Thimbleweed Park on the Nintendo switch, played through casual, and then hard mode. The world needs more games like this.

It's a lot better without you and your ignorant political foaming-at-the-mouth, Ronnieboy!

IMHO, most people on Twitter feel a big lack of attention and compensate that by using this service. If it wasn't so ugly, they would tell the world that they are sitting on the toilet. Just to say something. The bad thing is: these psychopaths indeed get the attention they were looking for. The louder, the more often they post stuff, the more they get. If you're not already a psychopath, it will turn you into one. That's why I never got an account there.

I also think that the printing and usual online media is paying way too much attention to what psychos post on Twitter. They give them a stage. You could say that our world today is quite strongly influenced by psychopaths — and very few people recognize it.