I am also fed up with a lot of aspects of Twitter, so I took a month off to decide if I wanted to stay, to see if it was important to me, to see if it was worth the time I spend using it.

I decided that, for me, it was. I stay in touch with people, I stay (somewhat) informed about what’s going on in the circles of my interests (films, cocktails, gaming, sassiness), and I still find humor, grace, beauty, and intelligence.

During the election last year and even more since, I started following newspapers and networks and journalists and pundits and politicians to try to keep up with the nightmare scenario…and that was the too much I didn’t want to handle anymore. I wanted Twitter to return to being an oasis and a respite and a funny place where funny people are, so I unfollowed all of that political-ness.

I still see it, of course. Others still retweet it into my stream, but I’m not bombarded with it endlessly from every direction. (Also I am not a woman so I avoid the rampant and unceasingly sexist nature of the platform, and I subscribed to a massive block list to keep a lot of the robot riff-raff off my back.)

Obviously, this doesn’t solve the problems listed in the article, but I also feel like we’re better off knowing that the president is an idiotic asshole saying and doing idiotic asshole things in public rather than having him use backchannel diplomacy to launch his little-fingered wars.

Anyway, that’s my coping mechanism. A highly-administered and carefully-curated Twitter feed.

Oh! Also I am blocking every advertiser on Twitter as a small, personal protest against their terrible or non-existent anti-abuse policies. If their answer to negating constant feeds of anonymous abuse is “you can always block them,” then that is exactly what I am doing — blocking the tweets that annoy me.