I joined Twitter in November 2008, the same year the original iPhone was released. I still don’t own an iPhone for personal use. Android ‘till I die. Back then, it was tweeting via SMS and having Tweetdeck open on the computer. At some point, I decided to protect my tweets in order to not be so public with social media. Last week, I decided that I should make a change and reach for a fresh start. So, I decided to delete all of my Tweets.

It started slow, I fought with OAuth and wrote a script to delete my tweets via the API. After multiple Bearer Token renewals (since they would only last for two hours) and dancing around rate limits of 50 deletes every 15 minutes, I caved and went https://tweetdelete.net/ to finish the job.

After I said goodbye to thousands of tweets, I noticed a couple of things and made at least one promise to myself with this fresh Twitter start: I won’t be tweeting about college football. Pouring over more than a decades’ worth of my stream of consciousness and looking back was…quite cringy. I’m embarrassed of multiple elements of my past, especially political beliefs, the incesssant commentary, complaining, low-status nonsense that was my tweet history.

It’s all gone now. I managed to take a couple screenshots and will always remember some fun interactions through the years. But ultimately, I’m relieved that my past won’t be haunting me. Well, at least that element of my past.

Here’s to a fresh start.