I Broke Twitter

Since I imploded my Twitter last month, a few strange things have happened.

First, I haven’t missed it.

This was really surprising, because while I was in the thick of Twitter it seemed tantamount to oxygen or coffee and the thought of doing without it seemed as odd as giving up either of those. But now, cold turkey as I am, I don’t miss it. At all.

Actually, that’s not completely true: in the same way that cutting back on sugar caused me to not miss sugar, but more to lament the absence of the ability of it to give me a kick, I also miss the role of Twitter in my life more for the vacuum it created.

I’m not jonesing for a Snickers bar, but I miss the role that Snickers bars once played in my life. Like an old friend who moved to Australia.

Second, it seems that I broke Twitter.

Here’s what my Twitter profile page header looks like:

Twitter seems to think that I have 1,149 “likes”, even though I deleted all of them. Indeed, if I navigate to my likes page, Twitter tells me “You haven’t liked any Tweets yet.”

Similarly, Twitter things that I’ve tweeted 30 times. When, in fact, I left a single tweet in place when I purged my archive: the first one, tweeted December 12, 2006.

On my timeline, in addition to that tweet, are an additional 6 retweets that, for some reason unknown, I cannot “un-retweet,” despite trying in myriad ways. The only thing these retweets have in common is that they’re old, and the original tweets were from simply-named longtime Twitter users (@David and @Alby). Like this one:

Perhaps these retweets were done in some earlier-era no-long-supported-and-cannot-be-undone manner. I seem to be stuck with them.

Perhaps Twitter received too much of a shock to the system by my wholesale withdrawal, and some regular re-indexing process will correct the above.

Fortunately, I don’t have to care about this because I’ll be using all the free time I have now while I’m not Tweeting to learn Mandarin or take afternoon naps.