The year was 2011.  My startup had closed, and I had spent the summer writing Android apps and blogging.  I had just joined a Google Ventures startup (Miso), and we all rented a bus to truck it up to TechCrunch Disrupt.

If you’ve been reading this blog these past 20 years, you likely know I love a deal.  I love teachnology.  I love a good giveaway.  And at times during my life I’ve been an avid collector of knives.  It was Autumn 2011 when these loves came together in a giveaway.

It was in the vendor row, and this start-up was taking on mechanical turk.  Their spin was they were doing it in Nepal, and to advertise this they were running a re-tweet contest.  The prize was a hand-carved Nepalese dagger. I was enthralled, and I immediately signed up for Twitter.

Twitter was never my style, and I always prefered having a long-form blog to short-form communication.  Still, it was all the rage and it seemed like it was doing some social good in the world.  Even though I never won that knife, I decided to stay on Twitter.

Over the next eight years I added integrations and plugins to my Twitter.  For a while it would automatically tweet when I liked a YouTube video.  Sometimes I would like someone else’s tweet.  Every once in a while I was featured in a tweet, usually around apprenticeship, and it would link to a LinkedIn article.

Now it’s the close of 2019.  An election year is upon us, and it’s been a pretty rough run these past three years here in the USA.  I no longer see Twitter as a force of social good in this world, and I’m lucky in that my relative non-participation affords me the privilege of an easy exit.

So, goodbye Twitter.  I’m shutting down the huntergdavis account, and removing it from my site sidebar.  I still have LinkedIn for professional networking, Github for code networking, my blog for long-form sharing and my email for direct messaging.