I was just thinking about how much fun Twitter was back in 2009.

That was when I first joined, back in April of '09. At the time, it had been just 5 months since my mom passed away and I was feeling very depressed and very lost. A friend of mine suggested I should join because, according to her, it was fun and it would cheer me up. It would provide an escape from my own personal darkness. I was skeptical but I set up an account.

For the first few weeks, of course, I didn't tweet at all. I didn't know what to say. It all seemed a bit silly to me. But then, one night, I just started tweeting about how much I loved the films of Dario Argento. And suddenly, other people were writing back to me and telling me that they too liked Argento. It may have taken me a while to get comfortable with twitter but, once I was, I discovered that I loved it. I discovered that I wasn't alone. There were other people out there who were in mourning. There were other people who were learning how to live with bipolar disorder. There were other people out there who were interested in the things that I was interested in. Even more importantly, there were people out there who were actually interested in what I thought about ... well, everything.

Oh, those wonderful members of early twitter. I would share a racy pic and count the retweets, the favs, and the follows. I would do Follow Friday and watch as my followers discovered each other. I discovered a group of bad movie lovers called the Snarkalecs and we would live tweet SyFy together. I met another film lover named Arleigh Sandoc and we started a site called Through the Shattered Lens. I even played a game called Stoner Tweets, in which my friends and I sent each other cyber marijuana. (It's hard to explain but it was fun! And perfectly legal so don't even start...)

See, that was twitter in 2009. People disagreed but they didn't get violent. You could make a joke without having to worry about some bitter bitch trying to destroy your life as a result. That was twitter in 2009. It was a place were ideas, new and old, could be shared and discussed. I loved it.

9 years later, it's sometimes difficult to remember what those early days were like. Twitter has become such a hateful place now. It's become a place where people try to ruin each other for sport. It's become a place where trolls search for fights. Ever since the election of Trump, Twitter has become an unbearably angry place. Some people blame the Russians. Some people blame the Trump voters. Myself, I think both those groups share some of the blame, just as I think that the members of the so-called Resistance, with their combination of arrogance, fury, and fear, are just as responsible. Every time I see someone new saying that they're trying to change the world through their twitter account, I cringe. People take twitter and its capabilities for granted now. We have the ability to instantly share ideas with people across the world and we mostly use that ability to trade insults and accusations. It's a shame.

I'm still on twitter, though I don't check as often as I used to and I no longer feel like I can just say whatever pops into my head. I'm a lot more cautious about what I tweet nowadays and that's something that I resent. 75% of the time, I hate looking at twitter and yet, I still do. It's become such a key part of my life (and the life of many others) that it's hard to break the habit of checking in. Every time I do glance at twitter, I swear to myself that I'm not going to get sucked into it but somehow, I always do.

Twitter is still effective. It's still addictive.

It's just not fun anymore.