Could it be? The once Twitter-happy Trent Reznor is done with social networking on the internet? Based on a lengthy post yesterday to Nine Inch Nails' official forum, Reznor says he is signing off after revealing that his two-year online onslaught was a successful marketing experiment.

"I will be tuning out of the social networking sites because at the end of the day it's now doing more harm than good in the bigger picture and the experiment seems to have yielded a result... Idiots rule," writes Reznor. "When Twitter made it's way to my radar I looked at it as a curiosity, then started experimenting. I thought it through and in light of where I was / am in my career I decided to lower the curtain a bit and let you see more of my personality. I watched some of you get more engaged because you started to realize there's a person (flaws and all) back there, and I watched some of you recoil in horror because I'm not what you projected on me. All expected."

But he cites "some people" who "exist to ruin it for others" -- namely the users of Metal Sludge -- as the reason for quitting the 'net. He describes them as "unattractive plump females" who "NOBODY will f---" that "make up stories about their incredible sexual encounters with people they WISH they could f---". Yikes.

As for his marketing strategy, Trent explains that "The reason no record label knows how to market anything to new media is they don't live there. They don't get it because they don't use it... Faced with leaving the infrastructure of traditional record labels and figuring out what the right thing to do is in this new world - I found myself realizing that for me to have any concept of how to interact with the community and know what they might want / what they find appropriate, I needed to immerse myself in that world and live it for a while."

Despite his rant, it seems Reznor isn't totally done with his 140-character musings. The bio on his Twitter feed now reads "This profile is now one-way, NIN / EDLC -related only, No @replies read until Twitter improves blocking." For those of you who aren't up on the service, that means he'll only be talking about music and Eric De La Cruz without responding to any more "idiots."