Keeping my tweets ephemeral

I think of Twitter as an ephemeral medium. It’s a place that I want use for idle thoughts and off-the-cuff interaction. But unfortunately, Twitter is a place where anything you’ve ever said can (and will be) used against you.

Most of the time, your Twitter feed has context. You know (roughly) the people who follow you and you know that most of your tweets will be taken in the context of the tweets that came before. If I write a joke about something political, it’s written with the context that most of my followers have a good sense of my political views (at least enough to know where I’m coming from with the joke.)

But “most of the time” isn’t “all of the time”. Most people in the world don’t care about Sam’s Twitter feed, but one day, I could “win” the Twitter lottery and suddenly have millions of people read one of my posts out of context. That doesn’t sound pleasant to me.

So even though I’ve dialed back on my Twitter use, every two weeks I have a recurring OmniFocus task to “Delete two-week old tweets". I use a service called Cardigan and delete any Tweets that are older than two weeks. I don’t care about these Tweets. You don’t care about these Tweets. I own them and it’s OK if they go away.

Sam Davies @mrbeefy