Why I only follow NASA on Twitter

Over Christmas this year I spent about 2 hours unfollowing everyone on Twitter except NASA and some astronauts! Why? I just had enough of the constant negativity, Twitter had become a place where most of the tweets I saw were just not pleasant, and there’s enough misery in the world these days without having to scroll through it.

It wasn’t so much the openly negative tweets, as the people I followed didn’t generally post anything too bad. It was instead the passively-negative tweets that became more and more prevalent — the ‘I’m going to say something bad about someone else to show how amazing I am” tweets e.g. “Why can’t X stop doing Y it’s so unfair to Z”.

I’m not against people complaining about stuff, that’s one of the cherished beauties of free media and democracies — I’m just not fond of seeing tweets from people who complain about stuff to try and score easy points. Even if the people I was following didn’t actually write anything like that, they liked tweets from folks who did— and they would then show up on my feed.

So I decided that instead of continually scrolling past passively-negative tweets I’d just cut them all out — and the only way I could think of was just nuking the entire list, apart from NASA.

Why NASA?

Because …

and

and

and so much more! When I go into Twitter, I can still search for anything I want, or see what’s trending — but in my feed is just interesting, inspiring tweets about all things space!

What about all the nice people I was following?

I felt slightly guilty about unfollowing friends, colleagues and others who were following me, but it was all or nothing! So don’t be offended or take it personally, I just wanted to see space stuff!

I ditched Facebook and Instagram a few years ago because I really don’t like Facebook’s ethics, but I’m still connected with people on LinkedIn so not a complete social media recluse!

Why don’t you try the same and see if you like it? Or you can follow me on Twitter at …