A treatise on Plurk

I'm going to explain why Plurk is the bane of my existence, and why I have been so much happier without it. Every time I go back, I inevitably see something that makes me twitch and close it again.

For a while, Plurk does make me feel, and I believe did make me feel, more in tune with people. It's amazing! Now I can be in touch with almost everyone, all the time! But the magic wears off. On Plurk, you're inundated with the thoughts of people who are near-strangers to you constantly, and there's a lot of reasons this might be problematic. Maybe you feel compelled to share things that didn't need to be shared. Maybe things you didn't even care about before now irritate you. Maybe you learn new, ugly things you didn't want to know about the people in your social circle. Maybe you just suffer overload: empathy fatigue and information flood all the time, every day, constantly sucking you in and sucking your spirit out.

And once the magic wears off, you're left with a lot of the following:

+ My games that you're not in are amazing!!!
+ Here are all the things I hate about that thing you love.
+ This is a passive-aggressive plurk designed to tell people you know and like that I am upset with them without actually saying so.
+ This is a plain old aggressive plurk about the players, characters, or situations that I hate.
+ Click here for the most depressing world and/or U.S. news update I could find.
+ Here is my inflammatory opinion about a topic that is going to make you grit your teeth, either because of me or because of the arguments within.
+ Today I feel like the worst human being in the whole world and I want to quit everything and move to Antarctica.
+ [meme] Tell me how awesome I am or I will assume you hate me, even though I ask you to do this in various ways four times each week!
+ [meme] Plot with me, if you're one of my favorite players!
+ I'm not "into" your game. or Your game is making me feel bad. or Your game is inferior to my other game.
+ Do you have an impending sense of doom about everything you enjoy yet? Let me add to it with my deliberately nonspecific brooding.
+ omg omg one of my 159 friends unfriended me on Plurk and I can't sleep until I find out who

Every single day. I have tried scaling back; I have 100 friends on Plurk but I only follow about 30 of them. But even then I get 40~ updates per hour. It's a lot. And it's exhausting. And it consumes you.

I'm not saying I'm not partially guilty myself, and I'm not saying you're a terrible person if you have ever made one of these plurks. On the contrary, I'm saying Plurk brings out that petty part of people, because Plurk is, itself, petty. These are all things present in our daily lives, but not pervasive. They're pervasive because 30 or 100 people updating you 2-3 times an hour on their life is bound to go there.

And when I shut myself off from that, I slowly get pieces of myself back. Like my patience and my tolerance and my enjoyment of my life.

I'm sorry, Plurk. Maybe it's just me. But I'm happier without you. I think we should stay casual acquaintances.