‘Football Twitter’ is a nightmare of abuse and attention-seeking, so I walked away

A few years ago, Charlie Brooker – creator of the brilliant Black Mirror and former Guardian columnist – hosted a show for Channel 4 that counted down the greatest video games of all time. A sucker for those sorts of things, not to mention a bit of a gamer in my youth, I tuned in with great interest. And there they were: Super Mario Bros, Mario Kart, Sonic the Hedgehog, Street Fighter II, GoldenEye, Call of Duty … on it went until it was time for Brooker to reveal the No 1. “What could it be?” I wondered. I was not ready for the answer, because the answer was Twitter.

A baffling choice, and I can’t remember Brooker’s logic for why Twitter was best of the lot. But I do remember his argument for why it was definitely a game, which was that, ultimately, the aim of people who use it is to collect as many followers as possible. Nobody wins Twitter but everyone plays it, trying their hardest to be among the most popular, influential, important people on there.

It’s something that stuck with me and turned over in my head whenever I logged into my account. What is the point of this? What am I trying to achieve? Am I, as Brooker suggested, desperately seeking attention? The answer I eventually came to is yes, I am, so I decided to log out once and for all.

Yes, that’s right, I’m off Twitter. Sober for a little under three months and loving it. I left during the World Cup and because of the World Cup, having decided to disengage as much as possible with a tournament whose very existence led to actual sick forming in my mouth. But the truth is it had been a long time coming and fundamentally for what we can at this stage call Brooker’s Law; that every tweet, to varying degrees, is a cry to be noticed.

A big opinion. Look at me. A