Yeah, I think I’m done. I still have a ton of friends on Twitter and there are folks I’ll miss, but…this shit just isn’t good for me anymore. Under the old management, there were obvious problems: The algorithm leaned to the right (by their own admission), the moderation was inconsistent, they couldn’t settle on a feed (make it chronological), wouldn’t add an “edit” button, but it was free and you could usually curate your follow list into something that was useful to you.
The current owner seems to have really leaned into the flaws as though they were strengths. While he’s done the world a great service by demonstrating that billionaires are bad people and not even necessarily clever, he doesn’t seem to have a handle on what made Twitter appealing. The algorithm is a trash-fire, the site is wildly unreliable, it seems like the answer to every problem is “pay for Twitter,” and then there’s the moderation.
I reported a bunch of tweets for misgendering a woman because, you know, they were. That’s explicitly one of the things you can report a tweet for. Unusually, I received a response to my report and the response was “Yeah, no, this is totes OK now LOL!” (I may be paraphrasing). So, yeah…that sort of crap is now Twitter-Approved!
As for the algorithm, it seems to have its “encourage a race to maximum radicalization” turned up to 11. You might think I’d be pointing my fingers at the right-wing, and yeah, there is oh-so-very-much of this. What’s interesting and infuriating is the far left race to the bottom. I listed a bunch of examples and decided against posting them. Let’s just say that it’s just as bad and leave it at that.
I don’t need that garbage in my life. I’m getting riled up just thinking about it and I’m tired of it. I was willing to put up with some of it, but the balance between “useful content” and “rage bait” is getting worse. It was already a compromise, and an increasingly dicey one.
Of course, it’s not as simple as deleting my account. It never is. I want to keep the account alive in case anyone tries to reach out to me and to ensure that the username doesn’t get picked up and spoofed (not that there’s a lot of value in spoofing me, but still…). But, I would like to remove my tweets. There is, of course, no mass delete function.
There are 3rd party tools to do it, but they are expensive now that the API has been restricted. The default functionality isn’t especially reliable, but there’s a workaround: You just have to provide the ID of each tweet you want to delete. This is a pain in the behind. You have to request an archive of your tweets from Twitter, come back a day later. Then, when you download and unzip the archive, you find that everything is in pseudo-JSON files and it isn’t immediately obvious what is where. So you have to find where the tweets are, find the field with the ID, find a way to parse the JSON into a list of IDs, paste that into the 3rd party tool, and voila!
It’s worth it though. I don’t leave stuff up on an abandoned account since there’s nothing but downside to doing that. I’ll just leave links to where I can really be found and leave it at that.
As for “where I can be found,” I’m rethinking that as well. Bluesky would be the 1-for-1 Twitter alternative and that appeals to me less than you’d think. Mr. Dorsey sold us out once already and there’s no reason to think he won’t do it again. I’ve been doing the “everyone is here!” social networking for a long time now and it has never been as satisfying to me as the LiveJournal “a smaller group of mostly friendly-minded folks sharing their diaries” paradigm.
I understand that there is value in having the opportunity for broad engagement. If I were to ever write a book or make a real album, that would be helpful. But, if I’m being honest here: I do not do “engagement” well on Twitter. When I look at the traffic this blog gets, most of it comes from search engines, Facebook, and then Mastodon. Even with several hundred followers on Twitter, I might get two clicks. I’m really not losing anything in that sense.
Speaking of Mastodon, I’m enjoying it. Not nearly as much going on, but I’m pretty happy with that. There’s not the sense of missing anything if I take a few days off. I like that. I don’t think the twitchy refresh every few minutes cadence of Twitter is good for me. The people I interact with aren’t celebs, generally aren’t people I know in real life, but I’ve enjoyed the conversations I’ve had. So, I’m committed to making it work.
Anything else? I’ll keep my eyes open to see if any other social network looks like it’s worth checking out. Maybe I’ll give Ello another look-I always liked the look of it and it certainly had a vibe. But…maybe it’s a hole that I don’t need to fill?
Oh, and of course, the “X” thing is just dumb, but that’s Elon for ya.
-RK