have you quit twitter yet?

I have taken the coward's path (logged out but not deleted)

same

provided i have any self control and/or don't otherwise turn out to need my account for dumb grad school scholar self promotion this is probably it for me

I’ve never had a Twitter account, am happy to watch people quit though

xp
oh gawd academic twitter is kind of the pits, though I get feeling that pressure

Twitter is the best social media platform. Instagram is too much of a walled garden (you can't even post links!), Facebook is literally useless, but Twitter allows me to have enjoyable conversations with people (including many ILXors) and weed out all the bullshit I don't want to see with minimal effort. And I post links there to everything I publish, promote my book, etc., etc. Twitter is great.

I will never log off.

respect

Twitter is my preferred avenue for receiving promotion from musicians, movie-makers, comic book creators, etc, as well as some small-to-mid-sized scientific accounts, and then just like random "here's a cute picture of a possum!" type stuff. I don't see a lot of negativity in my feed. When I do, I unfollow. I don't see any point in quitting.

i will continue to enjoy Twitter until some dork asks me to pay for it or give them my real name and address or something

I used to bloody love Twitter and met some irl great people whom I still speak to and see. Now, the only tweets I see are on this site; when I do follow a link I always have the same sense of 'fucking hell, thank God I don't spend time here'. It utterly saps me of energy.

So mostly 'no, but I'm thinking about it' I suppose.

why I logged out: I have a (perfectly rational) seething hatred of elon plus I was overdue for a break anyway.

There was something going around (on twitter lol) about returning to Tumblr, which I would honestly consider as that was my best soc med experience but would probably feel very strange

HOOS is back? Maybe I'll start posting here more again

Wait, are we not supposed to use products run by companies owned by assholes now?

Obviously Twitter sucks in many ways. But given that I have nostalgia for the text-based internet and don't want to post images or video along with words, it's really the only social media option. And I've made a lot of musical connections there that resulted in real projects. Would love an alternative that didn't somehow turn to garbage, though.

xp with my primary online timewaster no longer palatable to me i've gotta waste my time SOMEwhere you know

Instagram is too much of a walled garden (you can't even post links!)

wow an occasion to think fondly of instagram, doesn't happen too often anymore

Wait, are we not supposed to use products run by companies owned by assholes now?

you can do whatever you want?

reading the responses, I do wish I'd made this a survey on which social media platforms people still use in 2022 as that's a more interesting q, though it would also be a pain to make all the poll options

Where is "I'm already banned"?

oh dang I didn't think about that! I think you can vote "I am Elon Musk"

the only social media i use is tumblr. don't go there

xp
wait a minute: banned from twitter, lives in Florida... 🤔

where am i supposed to post unreasonably niche observations now? a thought i've only just seen.

Fuck no I haven’t deleted my account. Twitter is fucking amazing and has been an enormous net positive in my professional life. Instagram and Facebook can go to hell though.

l-r: my 401k match, me

me reaction to the news that a social media platform will now be owned by an evil billionaire pic.twitter.com/1tEMrlyjvW

— bolty (@AmbJohnBoIton) April 25, 2022

I'm just going to simply mute Elon Musk as a topic and live with whatever happens.

Years ago. I thought recently of re-upping, but given the current news I'll pass.

twitter is a website for lazy narcissists who are wrong about everything

hell yeah

Will there still be a board of directors at twitter or will MUSK be dictator

I chose I will never quit even though I might quit someday. Elon buying Twitter didn't make me want to immediately leave, but I could imagine him running it into the ground. It's perfectly fine now and I'm on there a lot, following the news and my various personal interests. I actively mute anything that doesn't interest me or that I don't want to see, and I steer clear of personalities I outright despise.

elon hasn't bought it yet, deal will close in 3-6 months. so no point quitting now

Chose will never quit but depending on what changes get brought in I might. Change of ownership by itself not enough for me, tech giants always owned by horrible people.

I don't see the point of treating the overpriced battery on wheels man as an exceptional scumbag, they're all horrible.

Stopped using Twitter in late 2016, exactly 10 years to the day after I joined. Didn't delete my account, but basically unfollowed everyone. Occasionally use it when I want to find something out in real-time, or to read a thread which someone has linked to here. Don't miss it at all.

Deleted my account 3 weeks or so before Musk joined the board. Was no longer enjoyable or useful to me.

Agree with Calzino that Musk isn't more pernicious than other billionaires. For those who plan to stick with Twitter his plans to loosen the moderation of it are probably still troubling, tho.

I like it, I mainly just follow all the retro gaming people and it's all good fun. I follow some comedians too, but have generally found that I only enjoy Blain Capatch stuff. Hopefully whatever happens once the deal is in won't affect my usage, we'll see.

Musk is worse/worst on Twitter due to the performative petulance in recent years even if that's mostly 'just' insults against others. But this is pretty much just the 'is Trump the figurehead worse than countless lower profile Republicans? Actually...' argument.

Worse no, more annoying yes. But annoyance is a valid reason to quit a social network, ofc.

No plans to quit. I'm rarely pissed off by content.

twitter is a website for lazy narcissists who are wrong about everything

my running assessment has been "Twitter encourages psychological projection to a point that it feels like that's all the site does"

Never signed in but read it. No ads!!!

Twitter can’t be all bad, it has @Cats of Yore

and fantastic one joke accounts like politicians hair on football managers

it was all downhill after Your Aunt Diane stopped tweeting in 2012

https://twitter.com/YourAuntDiane

I agree tech company owners are universally despicable, but this was the last major thing I read about Musk so I think there's a case to be made that he's even on the bad side of the tech billionaire spectrum: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-03-25/black-tesla-employees-fremont-plant-racism-california-lawsuit

otoh, I still have an IG account and I don't think Elon has facilitated a genocide yet, I'm typing this on a macbook etc.

https://i.imgur.com/IP36jUH.jpg

the chaff to wheat ratio on twitter is still too high though better obv than FB (actually FB has gotten better in this regard as I've unfollowed a million things and only look at posts from people I know, but I'm tired of the platform and UI now). that said, twitter has a unique ability to completely ruin my day so I'm going to stop looking at it so often. I avoided it for many years and only got really sucked in during the last year and a half.

Well ok but...twitter users are not the consumers of twitter products, which are advertising spots and user data. I don't really subscribe to this idea's most extreme versions—if you think of users as unpaid workers you have Terranova's "free labor"; if you prefer to think of them as the product being sold to the real consumers (advertisers) there's Smythe's "audience commodity"; or, popularly, "if the 'product' is free, you are the product." Those theories exclude a lot of what users get out of platforms & broadcast media, but nonetheless it's a fact that user-generated content creates the platform's value, so I don't think it's ridiculous to think about one's participation in social media as different from needing to consume goods and services under capitalism.

I'd say that a very small percentage of tweets are creating any value

sorry, I can't tell if that's just a joek or not

Only sort of. There are something like 500 million tweets per day, and the number of them that achieve high engagement, or are even read by another human, has to be pretty small. So unless you are a power tweeter you are only adding value in a butterfly-flapping-wings sense.

For me its as simple as weighing the utility of the site against my personal dislike of the oligarch in charge, and as it stands these days Prime Video continues to be good for my brain where Twitter is a dopamine addiction calibrated to piss me off between good jokes and obscure political pals

xp
Ah ok got it. So I perhaps unhelpfully combined two points:

1) Users create all the content on Twitter. If the users don't tweet, no one will visit twitter.com. This is the "free labor" theory* more or less: that the unwaged labor of tweeting is what creates the bulk of the company's value. It is true that much/most of this content goes essentially unseen, which is one reason likening it to wage labor isn't totally convincing, even apart from the issue of how users understand their own behavior on the network (generally speaking: not as labor). But at any rate, it's still significant that Twitter doesn't employ people to create content or even license it from elsewhere—compare to e.g., Netflix or Spotify—they get it for free from their users.

* tbf Terranova's theory predates the rise of social media and was more applied to people doing things like open-source software development, which more clearly resembles wage labor. It was also applied to blogging (I can't remember if she did that or people picked up on it from her), which also bears a resemblance to the waged labor of media production. OTOH media workers are often expected to tweet as part of their job responsibilities, so some of these lines get murky fast and that's not even mentioning influencers.

2) Users are the audience for all the content on twitter. Twitter sells this audience to advertisers and if you've ever played around with soc med advertiser tools, you'll know this isn't a metaphor, you can get quite specific with demographic targeting. Without users looking at tweets, there is no audience to sell. For advertising, it doesn't really matter which tweets users see, you just need them to pay attention to their feed / the site. And even if you never tweet or like a tweet or even make an account, you will still be sold to advertisers. Plus your behavioral data is commoditized, and, thanks to that, every single tweet holds some value even if no user sees or engages with it.

Sorry if this is all rather 'splainy; I don't have a good sense of how much non-academic people care about this stuff.

rob, have u read The Twittering Machine?

I have not! Would you recommend it? Seymour is the Lenin's Tomb guy, right?

yeah correct -- i quite liked it and there's a podcast called Our Regrettable Century hosted by a group of lefty burnouts that did a great three part series on it

thanking HOOS

this might be my first 'platform ditching' experiment. i feel like if i take the thing i really like about twitter (art account tweets) and make it more active research 'around the web' and in books on my part, it will be a more engaging and rewarding experience. i also have no professional reason to be on there and few followers. so it might actually take hold if i put in some effort. i guess i might miss being up on everything and having the occasional lol and trawling through random restaurant. but i think that stuff might be worth losing for the peace of mind, and also losing my login seems easier than unfollowing all of the annoying people. i never really understood the feeling of 'social media is a net drain on my life' until ca 2019-2020. like there was still an exciting or funny or engaging aspect to it up until that point. but i have a stronger feeling than ever that i need less of it. instagram for dj stuff and personal fb sounds manageable.

i guess i don't have to completely avoid the site if i lose my login either, like i can still check brisk god videos if i'm bored and tired lol

by 'lose my login' i think i mean deleting my account

the site is really unusable if you don't have an account

(one of the few good things about twitter)

i deactivated.

i also have no professional reason to be on there

See this was my mistake, putting all my eggs in DJ Twitter instead of DJ Instagram :)

perhaps the best solution to fixing Twitter is indeed to turn it off

i get most of the best parts of twitter (lit memes) when they show up on discord, and the worst parts of twitter (The Discourse, utter lack of healthy emotional boundaries) are a big part of, well, why i ghosted this site for like 20 months - just trying to learn how to interact with people in an emotionally healthy manner and shit.

it’s good to see you back here :)

Kate !!!!

y'all are sweet, good to see you again :)

@kate I read someone once saying Twitter was doomed because no one goes there to use it, it just gets repeated on other websites people do use.
But maybe that was too dire a prediction

I actually had to get a Twitter account as part of a class I am taking but luckily I already had one

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Ominous

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Only 8 elon socks here

elon hasn't bought it yet, deal will close in 3-6 months. so no point quitting now

― flopson, Wednesday, April 27, 2022 3:20 AM (one week ago)

This is kind of where I landed. If Musk actually does any of the deranged stuff he's said he might do, I will delete.

I will say while I recognize the truth of "all company owners are scum," there is something esp galling about how Musk wouldn't just be the owner of twitter he'd also be its most prominent user. Like if every time you bought something on Amazon a little animated Bezos popped up saying "thanks dawg" I would be even more hardcore about avoiding it, or if the app icon for Instagram was Zuckerberg's quasi-human face I would delete it instantly

there should be fines on Twitter tbh. i want bad tweeters fined.

Elon's Regret

Trying to quit Twitter because it'll be 10 years for me at the end of this month and that feels too long

I quit for like a year but went back. Made some changes though. Use different accounts now focused on different subject areas. So I can easily log out of a couple of them and still read about basketball. I also mute all replies and retweets, which cuts down on a lot of the low effort tweeting. I still leave quote tweets, but they are in a short leash. If it’s just people constantly dunking on others then I’ll either unfollow or mute. No hate follows.

I also don’t really tweet, I just consume. Very few interactions.

Why different accounts instead of lists?

I like the ability to log out of the account if I want to avoid that content for awhile. Introduces just enough friction for me to keep away. Too easy to switch lists.

I was surprised to learn that I've been on Twitter for eight years. I joined in 2014. That's six years until 2020 and two years until 2022, which is eight years. Six seven eight. Six plus two equals eight. That's how I counted up the total.

It's a lot easier than 2022 minus 2014. I don't have two thousand fingers and I can't mentally visualise two thousand separate things. Could I perform mathematical operations on large numbers by adding and subtracting the hairs on my forearms? No. My eyesight isn't good enough. It would be more practical to use pebbles. You might think this is just irrelevant waffle, but I'm actually exploring the limits of the human animal in isolation. I believe that the human animal can leverage its own body to amplify itself, without the use of technology.

But that's another topic for another time. In practice I think I've interacted with people on Twitter three times in total. I just use it to post links to my blog. One of the people I followed was Carrie Fisher's dog, Gary, but sadly that account was hacked by a cryptocurrency spambot. It does seem to have an official Instagram account though:
https://www.instagram.com/garyfisher/?hl=en

Why don't I interact with people on Twitter? Partially because my experience with social networks pre-Twitter has convinced me that it's not possible to have meaningful interactions with people you don't know. It's difficult enough figuring about people you went to school with, impossible with total strangers who only communicate with words. Partially because 140 character isn't enough to capture my awesomeness.

And there's the "had internet access before Twitter existed" factor, which is particularly relevant on Ilxor because this very website is older than most current internet giants. Amazon and the IMDB excepted. For an awful lot of people nowadays the internet is Facebook, Twitter, and to a slightly lesser extent Youtube - the idea of the internet as a medium that carries websites isn't a concept they are familiar with. But for you and I Twitter is Tuesday.

That's what links us, you and I. We alone can see the future stretching out ahead, because we saw the past; we were the past. All of this has happened before, and will happen again.

joined in november 2006, never logging off

That's right

i love twitter.
tweak your feed and its a very different experience.

congrats to the people who can use this platform without destroying their brains

tweak your feed and its a very different experience.

Indeed. Been there since March 2008.

The dopamine high I got from twitter was the most short-lived of any social media. It quickly became genuinely miserable for me to the point that I rarely feel any urge to go back. It felt like being in an overcrowded monkey house -- screeching on all sides, shit being thrown from every direction.

That’s actually a pretty good description of working there.

I still have a good time on twitter, but at this point I assume most of the people who ever followed me have me muted because the engagement ain't what it used to be. Either that or I'm just a worse person than I was 10 years ago.

I'm sure if I tweaked my feed and unfollowed a bunch of people, I would enjoy Twitter more than I do. But the main issue for me comes down to the intrinsically addictive quality of the platform. Whenever I have a spare moment, even walking from one room to another, I look at Twitter. If I do a good tweet, I obsessively check my notifications. I don't think I want to do that anymore. I don't like the way it has colonized my brain.

Whenever I have a spare moment, even walking from one room to another, I look at Twitter.

To be clear, this is hyperbolic. It's not every spare moment of every day, but it's often enough in moments like that that it feels...problematic. I want to know what happens to me when it's not influencing my habits so much.

Twitter is becoming a lost city. I explain the impending social media platform collapse my latest newsletter. https://t.co/5GigP1kS8V

— Annalee Newitz (@Annaleen) August 7, 2022

i don't disagree with the observation as an empirical observation, but the argument *why* that's happening doesn't make a ton of sense to me. twitter's leadership has always been unstable and (among users who are aware of it) very unpopular.

Yeah agree with that, lack of an edit button isn't going to end Twitter.

I think the observation about newsletters has something to it though. It is interesting that the most promising new money-maker for writers is via our last federated social network.

tumblr is still good btw

Without Twitter, I feel so disconnected from The Discourse. I don't need to tweet about it or read a bunch of unrelated bullshit that I don't care about. But I want to know what's going on.

There used to be app called Nuzzel that basically aggregated the most popular links that people you followed were sharing, and so you could log in and instantly see, for instance, a juicy scoop that had just dropped that everyone was talking about. I liked it as a way to get up to speed after being offline for a few hours. But I think someone also once described it as methadone for Twitter addicts. Anyway, Nuzzel was shut down a couple of years ago, and now the concept has been integrated into Twitter Blue. Which means that the only way to experience it again requires not only logging into Twitter but also paying for the privilege.

So far, the best substitute I've found (apart from refreshing ILX and the NYT website more frequently) is the Today in Tabs newsletter, but that's of course limited by what that one guy finds interesting. I wonder if I'll eventually just lose the desire and stop caring about What's Happening on the Internet (seems unlikely).

I have twitter and look at twitter but otherwise don't really interact with twitter. But lately I've been getting pushed a bunch of tweets from GOP assholes - like Desantis, Pompeo, Jim Jordan - who are followed by reporters I follow, which is making me really suspicious. Like, I get why a (say) CNN reporter would follow Jim Jordan (for example), but that same CNN reporter likely follows a millions politicians and political figures and the like. So why does Twitter's algorithm keep cherrypicking conservative asshole tweets to serve up?

They're surprisingly upfront about it at least?
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-politicalcontent

Huh. It's definitely weird to me, because it's only ramped up in the last week or so, and the algorithm should recognize (based on who I follow, and block) what I would or would not be interested in. Like, I don't want tweets from Nancy Pelosi, either, but if the robot was going to pick between serving me bullshit from her and bullshit from Jim Jordan, it should already know the answer before it even asks the question.

I know different people like different things, but I can fathom looking at Twitter in anything other than reverse chronological order.

Yeah, Twitter is chaotic enough without an algorithm feed.

Tweak New Twitter browser extension improves everything:

Overview
Remove algorithmic content from Twitter, hide news & trends, control which shared tweets appear on your timeline, and improve the UI
Remove algorithmic content:

– Keeps you on the Latest Tweets (chronological) timeline, automatically switching you back if Twitter tries to move you to the "Home" (algorithmic) timeline
– Hides the new timeline tabs if you have them
– Hide "Who to follow", "Follow some Topics" etc. in the timeline
– Hide "What's happening", "Topics to follow" etc. in the sidebar
– Hide "More Tweets" when linked to a tweet
– Hide algorithmic tweets based on likes, replies, lists, and suggested topics in the "Home" timeline, if you use it
– Hide Explore page contents

Control which tweets shared by people you follow appear on your timeline:

– Move Retweets to a separate timeline (default setting), or hide them entirely
– Move Quote Tweets and replies to them to a separate timeline, or hide them entirely (off by default)
– Hide tweets quoting accounts you've blocked or muted
– Mute quoting of specific tweets - adds a "Mute this conversation" menu item to Quote Tweets in the timeline

Chrome version. Firefox version.

Today is my 10-year Twitter anniversary. I haven't tweeted in over three weeks, which is surely the longest such period during the past decade. I've looked at tweets when they've been posted elsewhere, and I've also occasionally gone in and searched for stuff. I'll go so far as reading replies to whatever I'm clicking on. But what I haven't done is scroll through my own feed.

As I expected, I've been reading ILX more during the times when I otherwise would've been scrolling Twitter, which doesn't necessarily solve the basic compulsive tendency, but it feels less addictive. I still feel cut off from the discourse, but might be coming to terms with that, as the FOMO wears off and it becomes out of sight, out of mind. ✌️

I changed a couple of settings, and already my twitter experience (as such) is radically different. Suddenly it's all just ... settled down. I don't follow many people anyway, but now there's not nearly as much (or really any) garbage jumping to the front of the queue. It's just boring ol' posts from people every few minutes, which, yeah, really tramps down that dopamine hit and seems much less likely to get my outrage machine running, both good things.

I follow 1,300 people or so, and it's a fairly steady stream most of the time. Can't imagine what it's like for the psychopaths who follow like 30,000.

1,300 accounts, I mean (not all of them individual people)

lol I follow ... 82?

I appear to be following 2800 people, which is definitely insane, and mainly due to being polite.

Tweak New Twitter browser extension improves everything:

Thank you so much for this. That new Related Tweets thing was driving me up the wall.

i follow 120 people and have made 1,100 tweets in 14 years. maybe i am not even using twitter in the first place, statistically

i've made 21,422 ilx posts in roughly the same time period, and i think there's a lot more than 120 regulars here

I use Twitter to talk to my irl friends as well as Twitter pals. And since my brother died, it's become a real lifeline for keeping in touch with his friends in the very lowest-key way possible. Plus jokes.

I wonder if people use Slack for liek small freinds groups

My husband and I use it to talk to each other. Neither of us uses it in a work context, so it's perfect.

get the impression most small groups are on whatsapp or signal (or local equivalents, e.g. fb messenger, kakaotalk, etc.). slack and discord works too, but they're a bit computery for a lot of people.

I wonder if people use Slack for liek small freinds groups

― | (Latham Green), Wednesday, September 7, 2022 3:25 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Ever wonder what happened to the Chicago threads?

I haven't followed many more than 1000 accounts at a time on twitter, but it's fun following and unfollowing different accounts to change things up. I like that all of it is very much in public

slack sounds like some kind of gossipy nextdoor thing to me. I'm probably wrong in thinking that, but it doesn't seem appealing at all

I heard that Slack is great for expressing opinions about message board posters!

I think most people use it for work.

I've been doxxed once for a review, and I've seen grisly shit, but not once have I thought about quitting Twitter. Maybe I've screened it too well. I gotta click on Nazi shit to get knots in my stomach.

I will always follow you Alfred

love you

slack sounds like some kind of gossipy nextdoor thing to me. I'm probably wrong in thinking that, but it doesn't seem appealing at all

not really. more like private IRC servers.

I tried joining a Discord group (board? community? I don’t fucking know) and hated everything about it instantly. Twitter is definitely my favorite social platform. I really need to wipe my Facebook account, though. That is a true hell site at this point. It’s got so many promoted posts that it’s like trying to communicate with people by shouting at them from the opposite end of a mall.

I have a few middle-aged friends on Marco Polo and they recently invited me to try it out. Instant revulsion. I guess it’s kind of a private group-based TikTok?

get the impression most small groups are on whatsapp or signal
The reason we use Slack as a private messaging service is because it has a different alert sound, so we always know to check it asap. If WhatsApp let you set different alert sounds for different groups, we would probably just use that. (Maybe it does now? I haven't checked in a while.) We used to use a couples app called Avocado, which was great. You could store lists in it and you always knew for sure who the other person was. But most couples apps are too cutesy. "Send your babe a heart sticker!" Yeah, no. I just want to remind him to get paracetamol on his way home.

I heard that Slack is great for expressing opinions about message board posters!

― Halfway there but for you, Thursday, 8 September 2022 bookmarkflaglink

That's right.

the confusion is entertaining me because I remember the mid 90s when a few seasoned irc users would grouse about instant messaging apps

"why would I need icq/aim/etc when I can just send a private message on irc?"

and now most workplaces have rotated all the way through only having email -> private message apps -> teams/slack/etc and we've gone full circle back to irc

The Queen is about to die you can't quit now

elon hasn't bought it yet, deal will close in 3-6 months. so no point quitting now

― flopson, Wednesday, April 27, 2022 3:20 AM (six months ago)

point: flopson

People are going to be allowed to send death threats to one another.

Why quit now?

Thank my zonxu stars for ile

I deactivated last night. If you don't reactivate in 30 days, then they let you consider it deleted (although info from it may still be around). Hopefully, even if he does fire 3/4 of employees, as was
recently reported intention, hackers won't get to little old me before then.

I never, in eight years of posting, had any trolls, any other kind of problem. It was fun.

i'm not going to quit

I basically treat twitter as a little music outpost where I see posts from a relatively small number of people, dm tracks to dj & producer friends, and only about 20 people ever seem to see what I tweet. I try to ignore the rest of it (latest tweets mode is helping hugely with that!). So I'll stay on until it becomes a wholly unenjoyable experience.

dow -- why have you quit if you had no problems?

Funnily enough I am messing with my settings for the first after being on it for five years.

Twitter has built a huge list of interests, which I want to clear. I'm having to until boxes lol

*untick

I actually was required to get a Twitter account for a class I'm taking but I had on already - Like all social networks it is only as enjoyable as the people who yo uare networked to on it and most people I know do not use it so its like a small exclusive club for me

Twitter is my preferred avenue for receiving promotion from musicians, movie-makers, comic book creators, etc, as well as some small-to-mid-sized scientific accounts, and then just like random "here's a cute picture of a possum!" type stuff. I don't see a lot of negativity in my feed. When I do, I unfollow. I don't see any point in quitting.

― peace, man, Tuesday, April 26, 2022 1:47 PM (six months ago) bookmarkflaglink

I haven't seen too much talk in my feed about leaving. I'm definitely not happy about Musk owning it though, or the specter of Trump's return. My revulsion at Musk has only increased over the past 6 months. Ultimately, all of the accounts I follow are for idle entertainment and I'm more amenable to deleting mine, although I might have to figure out where else some of the smaller accounts I follow reside on the internet.

Will more people read Trump's statements if they are on tWITTEr? I mean people who want to read them no where to find then now right?

unequivocally yes people will read Trump's tweets, ime it's not really about wanting to find them or not

I signed out a couple months ago to focus on a deadline and haven't really missed it much tbh. I definitely won't even think of signing back in until the US elections are past

I mean whenever he posts something truly insane on Truth Social it winds up all over Twitter anyway

not planning to leave, but will re-evaluate if it turns into an utter dumpster fire

"Before Mr Musk’s takeover the company was owned largely by institutional investors, with the Vanguard Group the biggest stakeholder at 10.3 per cent. Mr Musk himself held a 9.2 per cent stake."

Not sure this was any preferable to Musk Ox

they own about 10% of everything

or they hold it on behalf of their investors.

Feeling better about my decision to quit three months ago. As noted upthread, I haven't entirely deleted my account, and I still do look at tweets posted elsewhere and occasionally search within the site. But I deleted the app off my phone and never read my own timeline, which means I spend considerably less time on it. I also downloaded my archive, which I like having if I do decide to delete my account. (For now, I want to maintain the ability to contact people through the site if needed.)

After some thought, my current decision is to unfollow a lot of the random and more useless accounts so that I can keep an eye on what the ones I truly care about are doing.

like the Healthcliff P.H. comments one

this place is evil and destroyed my mind even during that phase when they were making half-hearted attempts to moderate explicitly violent fascist content (when it wasn't coming from bluechecks) - thank god I've been banned too often to bother trying to participate because it seems so much worse in that regard these days (as if in anticipation for what's coming). if checking it for 2 mins can still fuck my day up I hate to think what hours most days for years did to my brain

it definitely did something bad because if I have a phone or computer to hand I'll still start mindlessly typing the url and have to stop myself through conscious effort if I realise in time what I'm doing

dow -- why have you quit if you had no problems?

― xyzzzz

But I've got 30 days to reactivate, and could later start over with new screen name.

if I have a phone or computer to hand I'll still start mindlessly typing the url

Over a month ago I installed a website blocking app on my phone to help keep me away from some of my worst time sinks (never ilx tho, lol) and I still unconsciously try to go to twitter a couple times a day.

yeah I need that ha

I’ve not quit Twitter, I’m just there

Every few months I get my husband to lock me out of my Twitter account for a little break, which is great in some ways, but Twitter is where I get my actual news from, so I always feel very cut off from the world when I do this.

It's the comedy I will really miss if it all goes away. People like Vinny Thomas or Andrew Nadeau.

i'll miss art / painting tweets. i'll legit miss random restaurant, i've spent hours browsing that (h/t lag00n). i just need to find more quiet content type things on the internet where i can kill time in a non-anxiety-inducing way.

someone on a library listserv was talking about something called mastodon. anyone here familiar with it?

Is that the same thing as CounterSocial?

Mastodon is open source, hence its appeal

quiet content type things on the internet where i can kill time in a non-anxiety-inducing way.

Some People have been talking ig’nant smack about pinterest over on the elon musk thread but i can attest that pinterest is dope for this purpose.

Will more people read Trump's statements if they are on tWITTEr? I mean people who want to read them no where to find then now right?

Beyond Trump, we're about to enter a realm of "Can you believe what Milo / Gavin MacInnes / Pillow Guy said today??"

no one will ever wonder about mypillow guy unless he gets a lot more entertaining

I quit twitter the day that musk signed the purchase agreement. It'll be a cold day in hell when I participate in anything that has that tumor's name on it.

mastodon has several excellent qualities but the best of all that is that tweets are now toots

deactivated mine friday after a couple months of logged-out non-use

i have all my tweets and retweets automatically deleted weekly and do not care about whatever 'information' I've put on twitter per se. I was concerned this morning when I got an email saying they were not taking any action against an account I reported for an explicitly antisemitic tweet; but when I actually went to twitter I had a notification that said the opposite, and that account was restricted.

Layoffs are supposed to hit Twitter tomorrow or Tuesday, so I think we'll start to see what the implications of this change of ownership are after that. I'm largely a hate-user of twitter anyway so unless many many many people leave I doubt I will. I don't know why it's harder to quit than FB (which I didn't quit, I just stopped using it actively and only go to it maybe once every three days and never spend more than a minute there).

I honestly find out about news faster from twitter than any other source, so I guess that's why I am reluctant to quit it. If media outlets abandoned it, it would be less interesting to me.

I don't know why it's harder to quit than FB

I would guess because Twitter can be configured to actually provide real-time information, news and entertainment, whereas FB mostly feels like just people posting vacation travelogues and neighborhood events.

I quit a month ago, spur of the moment, couldn't stand it any longer. Now it looks like I quit because of this takeover. I want to make it explicit that I quit because of what it is, not who owns it. But if this accelerates the leaving and the seeking of default social media that doesn't alienate the many and lionise the few while turning engagement into zero-sum polar binaries, then good

xp: guess once twitter burns down most ppl will go on tik tok and destroy the platform for the younger crowd that are on there.

guess once twitter burns down most ppl will go on tik tok and destroy the platform for the younger crowd that are on there.

Not a chance. Most people who are comfortable typing out their thoughts are gonna have zero interest in filming themselves talking.

Every time I see a Tiktov vdeo it just makes me hate the human face more

I would guess because Twitter can be configured to actually provide real-time information, news and entertainment

There are a couple of single-serving twitter feeds I follow for this reason, but it's easy enough to put them in News Explorer (which can read RSS, twitter, YouTube, and Reddit feeds without actually having to be on those sites)

I deleted my twitter!! f u elon

i thought i would just bumble along like usual but the past few days i haven't spent more than a few minutes on the site without the image of this asshole invading my psyche, so i deactivated, we'll see if i can make it through a month.

it's really the only news source i had so idk what to do about that, fb is a nightmare for news obviously. i'll be a corpse before i choose to watch cable news. maybe i don't actually need news, what an incredible idea.

i wish there was a youtube channel with the teletext local forecasts that used to run on the weather channel in the 90s, maybe set to an endless screensaver of landscape photos, or better yet, photos from "random restaurant", i would watch that for hours on the weekends.

no news would probably be a life boon, but fwiw I tend to look at the Guardian and Al Jazeera for "what's going on today" purposes because neither has a paywall (plus some Canada-specific places) and I tend to only be interested in one or two articles max so it's not a big time suck

huh i will take this under consideration ty

gonna be fun when random trolls pay $8 to pretend to be public figures and all the people who are supposed to verify them have been fired

i thought i would just bumble along like usual but the past few days i haven't spent more than a few minutes on the site without the image of this asshole invading my psyche

i wish there was a youtube channel with the teletext local forecasts that used to run on the weather channel in the 90s

Searching "weather channel teletext" brings up hours of these

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vyImqK1Z0o

oh yeah straight into my veins

maybe quitting twitter will rid my vocabulary of annoying twitterish phrases like "straight into my veins"

So did Stephen King tweet how 'bout $8 a month and the dude basically said f'it...that will work?

Stephen King's final offer was $0 a month

the $8/month was Musk lowballing himself

I have to admit to having a morbid curiosity about who some of y'all follow that cause such grief and rage upon opening twitter. I like the fact that it gives me control of exactly this.

I follow only music/podcasting/history people, block and mute anyone annoying and mute things I don't want to hear about like "elon" and it's actually quite a pleasant place to hang out now.

yea Twitter can be a fun experience if you follow the right accounts. for me it's mostly sports/music/comedians/random people I think are cool. I think the key is to not follow too many politics people

Yeah, it takes constant weeding and careful pruning, but part of why I'm so disappointed with this acquisition is that I'd finally felt like I'd cultivated a feed that wasn't rage inducing.

not good!

Here's what we know:
1. Trump is dead (died badly)
2. @elonmusk has suppressed this news (or has he?)
3. Donald Trump Junior is now just plain Donald Trump

please like and share.

— Tim Heidecker: Sole Host of On Cinema (@timheidecker) November 1, 2022

yea Twitter can be a fun experience if you follow the right accounts. for me it's mostly sports/music/comedians/random people I think are cool. I think the key is to not follow too many politics people

― frogbs, Tuesday, November 1, 2022 4:11 PM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Probably true. I think Twitter in the Trump era would've felt different no matter what, but it didn't help that I coped with Trump's 2016 win by following a bunch of political reporters and commenters in the months after the election.

Another tip for twitter enjoyment is disabling retweets from users you follow (on a user by user basis). I guess it would be cool if you could do a mass disabling, but I don't believe it's an option.

First time I had to do that was for Ava DuVernay because she would retweet EVERY TIME someone said one kind word about a movie or tv show she made. Cleared up so much space in my timeline.

Now I do it a few times a week.

The first person I ever muted was a coworker whose feed was 95% retweets of the "spreading awareness"/"signal boosting" variety. Prob wouldn't have minded seeing her own tweets but could not deal with all of that.

I know you're off twitter now, but you can just disable retweets instead of wholly muting the account.

Yeah, I did not know that! Good tip.

just got kicked off

don't know why, they didn't specify

anyway, good

Another tip for twitter enjoyment is disabling retweets from users you follow (on a user by user basis). I guess it would be cool if you could do a mass disabling, but I don't believe it's an option.

― Ⓓⓡ. (Johnny Fever), Wednesday, November 2, 2022 12:24 AM (forty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

you can mute the string "RT @" or you can run this https://turn-off-retweets.jvns.ca/

Irish politicians will be delighted if everyone quits Twitter. They absolutely hate it. It gives people the ability to counter their lies or mistakes without having to be invited on the TV or radio to debate them in person. If it wasn't for Twitter, we wouldn't have known that our minister for agriculture and a whole load of other grandees attended a big dinner dance at a golf club together at the height of the COVID restrictions, for example. Broadcast media tends to pick up the stories afterwards. I don't want to lose that immediacy or that fact-checking ability.

surprised to hear so many people position twitter as the only option for news aside from broadcast media. yall realize there are a couple big ones that you are leaving out?

Twitter isn't itself a news source, but it's a very good distributor of news. News can travel quickly through retweets, and users encounter it passively (often with useful context, or at least salience, already attached to it). Without Twitter, I spend more time browsing the NYT homepage and clicking on the odd headline that interests me, but it's not the same, for better or worse.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

It does get old, when everyone retweets the same thing but yeah exactly

Between having no cable and shitty websites and whatnot, I actually do find a lot of news relatively hard to access. We do subscribe to the Washington Post, and even that one is often broken in Chrome and frequently won't let me stay signed in and read stories (for some reason). So yeah, real-time news, especially breaking news, often gets to me faster via Twitter than it does via the actual news sources, and who I follow (and/or trust) helps control what news or kind of news reaches me first. Even a relatively slick operation like NPR often lags on important (to me) news by several hours, if not days.

do we have an alternate social media thread? I'm curious if anyone on ilx has experience with Mastodon

Twitter is a really good place for NBA news and highlights

also learning about stuff from multiple viewpoints in the same "timeline" i.e. Ferguson was really useful to get the "same" news from different angles

Mastodon suuuuucks. It's not centralized, so it's really hard to find other people; everyone basically has their own little Mastodon fiefdom. I've signed up for counter.social, but that one seems really annoying too. I doubt I'll ever use it.

for what it's worth, at least a couple of the people I followed on Twitter that have stopped have continued to post the same stuff on Instagram.

hard to imagine searching Insta for breaking news lol

Twitter really is the best for finding out about something in real time imo

xp
yeah every time I look into Mastodon I just get confused by the baroque descriptions of how it works and give up, oh well

what if everyone on twitter switched to ilx

the everything app

xpost

New Answers: I Love Everything
45 Active Users Subscribe (unsubscribe in preferences)

Open if you aren't afraid to hear about the PLANdemic [Started by fony tauci (unbeweebable) in November 2022, last updated Wednesday, November 2, 2022 9:44 AM by I dissent (Frank COVID IS AIRBORNE)] 1,200 new answers

shit I seen at the hipster coffee shop [Started by Jacob Wohl in November 2022, last updated Wednesday, November 2, 2022 9:43 AM by Frankie Figgs] 1,187 new answers POLL results

#WednesdayWisdom [Started by Furious Mom in November 2022, last updated Wednesday, November 2, 2022 9:43 AM by STOP THE LEFT] 459 new answers

i have soft-quit twitter (ie not deleted my account but logged out of it everywhere and not let myself log back in) several times and it is always a good move. i would be on twitter all day during work and then by the end of the day i would feel so anxious and depressed. i don't even hate-follow awful people but it's still constantly being bombarded with the worst news from everywhere in the world. after a while i tell myself i can manage it, i won't go on twitter if i'm feeling vulnerable that day but otherwise it's ok, but i still end up at that point where i feel so sad and terrible by the end of the day. so i should probably just delete my account. the only problem is the rest of the internet feels boring in comparison, there's nowhere else that is constantly generating so much new content and information (a lot of which is good and interesting and funny) so quickly.

time for ilx recruitment drive

Pretty much mute any current affairs on Twitter. The world ain’t so great. Mainly stay for music polls, and stuff like that

mastodon is quite slow right now, presumbly bcz there's a surge of ppl joining or rejoining

decentralisation causes one single hiccup -- apparently enough to be offputting to many -- which is that right at the start you have to pick an "instance" to join up. like the gate you go through in. there's an element of luck here (for practical purposes and for accessing the main flow and building a timeline it doesn't matter which one you're in; but some are very robust and others are flaky and if you don't have ppl advising you there's no way of knowing which in advance; the populous ones are likely to stick around but i think also more likely get sluggish; the tiny ones in some weird language may be totally fine or totally flaky, esp.if you don't speak the language) (i think there are some specialist ones with limited access so best avoid them also) but it's not that hard to switch once you're in and know yr way round a bit better

timelines: exactly as with twitter, you track the world via yr own curated timeline -- so you have to find yr faves and follow them (with certain exceptions it doesn't matter if they're in a different instance); in addition (twitter doesn't have this) you can track the world via a local timeline (everything else posted in yr instance whether or not you follow them) and a federated timeline (literally everything else posted by anyone whether or not you follow them); the second moves very fast and is in many languages -- mainly japanese last time i was using mastodon a lot -- and generally incomprehensible, unless u read japanese i guess.

the main drawback of joining is that (like any new socmed platform) you will have to rebuild yr network (which takes time) and some ppl won't be there at all! the main drawback of rejoining is that most of the ppl i enjoyed reading were gathered round the helldude when he was banned from twitter a few years back and that little community went dark when he started a new twitter acount

is it daunting? maybe! but i am older than you (most likely) and i puzzled it out quick enuf so stop yr blubberin

i am @dubdob✧✧✧@masto✧✧✧.soc✧✧✧

tweets are toots!

lol

at dubdobdee at mastodon dot social

agreed with NA, I follow mostly good people but Twitter still gives me a lot of anxiety and dread. a lot of leftist accounts really do seem to think everything is the end of the world and sometimes that attitude can just ruin your whole day. I think that as human beings we were not really meant to have the entire weight of the world on our shoulders especially when we do not have any power.

Can’t even work out the server thing on Mastodon and then when I got somewhere it wouldn’t accept my password :(

I’ll maybe try again

Or just check back in a decade or so

xp
haha fair enough and thank you for elaborating

tbh maybe it's less about incomprehension and more a more basic uncertainty about its value & appeal. i.e., "some are very robust and others are flaky and if you don't have ppl advising you there's no way of knowing which in advance" is more or less where I keep giving up. how did you pick an instance to start with? (ok I think I figured that out in the xpost of your id)

i gave it deep thought as you can see

I think the first thing I can across was like a furries server or something

unpossible

I’m going to try again on the big computer.

"mastodon is quite slow right now, presumbly bcz there's a surge of ppl joining or rejoining"

Yup, keeps timing out for me.

yeah eugen gargron sez he's awaiting delivery of a powerful new server

Good to know steps are being taken.

do we need an ilx-centric mastodon server or smth

yes get this sorted poster mh

i would rather use ilx

but tweets are now toots!

i will give mastodon a try if it survives the next few weeks lol.

I'm reading up on how it works. Seems like it'd work well with a number of small- or mid-sized servers, and the amount of traffic you'll get is completely dependent on what users on your server subscribe to. You can have the front page be a variation of the classic firehose ofall the toots (lol) from your server, plus those from all accounts that the users on your server subscribe to.

I think it'd scale super well with a myriad of small to mid sized servers with the most popular users not all being on the same ones. Obviously this is the opposite of what's happening.

It felt like I was picking the geocity I wanted to live in all over again. I’ll never use this thing.

I mean, we could collectively all join one instance, take a vote as to whether we want to keep it going, and then roll on or shut down

what would be the difference between that and ilxor.com

you could follow/retoot (?)/interact with other people not on ilx

i tried to sign up to the tribel offering the other evening.
very buggy and constant performance issues.
its going to take a lot for me to completely quit twitter.
i rarely see anything too unpleasant due to a small echo chamber setup on it.
a few news/journos + record labels + bands + producers + music nerds.
and little else.
makes my twitter experience rather enjoyable.

i would be super down for trying a ilxor mastodon (he says, not knowing anything)

i hate twitter and have started reading it compulsively even though its just people saying 'normalise breadsticks' or posting screenshots of sitcoms i've never heard of with the caption 'yass kween' and would be glad if this guy ruins it just enough so that it breaks my compulsion. I remember being hooked on FB years ago and then it got really boring all of a sudden so hopefully that happens soon and I can go back to only watching fashion shows on youtube.

people always think that whatever website will obsess them forever but like remember when nobody could stop posting on ilx and you would like try to post on a thread and every time would get the skipping messages thing and now the only thing anybody posts about are twitter drama and whether ilx is dead

you go girl

im not even being rude about ilx, it was obviously better than twitter which is just total gibberish

breadsticks should maybe be normalized

remember when nobody could stop posting on ilx and you would like try to post on a thread and every time would get the skipping messages thing

yes I do, rvturn

Deleted all my tweets - going read only from here on out.

Can't really quit Twitter per SE, all 16 of my accounts are banned.

I am going to be the last on there. I'll be reading the last tweet.

lightweight unless you *post* the last tweet

There really isn’t a comparable place to Twitter. Am I supposed to hop on Instagram and write like “the only slasher icon who believably eats ass is Jason Voorhees” underneath a photo of some nice leaves I saw

— Vinnie Mancuso (@VinnieMancuso1) November 4, 2022

^ perfect description of why I never liked Twitter right there!

There are literally infinite ways you can shape your own experience with twitter, and that is ONE of them. But ok.

He could just post a picture of Jason on Instagram and write the same thing for crying out loud. Hell, he could write a whole essay on it over there.

i signed up for post, haven't followed anyone yet, but the "posts" it's serving me make it seem like a parler or truth social for resistance libs lol

like, this was the first thing i saw when i logged in today: https://post.news/article/2J8SVsZ2IBvBJ2sXxIprQXFciTx

fucks sake.

lol get yer "You Don't Know Jack" trading cards here

mastodon is good imo

Getting better fast too.

As soon as people on ilx start posting Mastodon links instead of tweets I’ll have to switch

Tweetshelf is no longer free :(

I think this is related to Twitter charging to access its API, so sites that are built on it need to create revenue stream.

Tiwtter app got cross at my never checking it anymore, started sending me random tweets it thought I might like, so I uninstalled it.

is it weird to have not quit but to have the platform essentially beg/dare you to every day?

Feel like this needs a do-over. I'm pretty sure I voted that I'd never quit, but I left months ago. I was hoping for some End Days of Twitter excitement until a final blowout but it's more just drawn-out and boring.

i still haven't quit. there are a handful of people / pubs i find valuable. and nice art bot accounts and stuff that are too good to let go of for me, too good of a time waste and a distraction. also stuff like my regional office of the national weather service, who also posts on facebook, but good luck getting updates on chron order there. i thought mastodon might do it for me but it was too much work :|

Mastodon feels pretty similar to me. I don't quite understand people's issues with it beyond "I fear change". Having said that, I haven't got anything that feels like a community on there yet, but I put that down to me having run out of steam on most social media platforms - I didn't post much on twitter before I left and I haven't posted much on Mastodon, so there's no real reason for anyone to follow me if they don't already know me.

I keep thinking about joining tumblr for the lols, but I've thought about it for over a decade and never done it.

pubs i find valuable

Eh you can just call up for opening hours, no need to follow on social media.

is it weird to have not quit but to have the platform essentially beg/dare you to every day?

― rob, Tuesday, 4 April 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Hate that dog, but I'm still not quitting.

Same. It's the only place where I feel some sense of community with other people who make a similar type of music. No idea if that also exists on Mastodon or how to find it tbh.

My huge problem with Mastodon is there's no search. I know that's a fundamental decision for them and it's not changing, but search on Twitter is hugely useful in so many ways. That's what makes it very difficult to discover/visit all those communities that you're not part of

my bot host has had the plug pulled by twitter. it's as if 58,000 voices cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

After 8 years and 58440 bots... CBDQ has come to an end. Thank you to @GalaxyKate & to everyone who has made a bot. It's been a pleasure. pic.twitter.com/8C6gXzuRRX

— v buckenham (@v21) April 6, 2023

Repeated, targeted harassment against any account will cause the harassing accounts to receive, at minimum, temporary suspensions.

The words “cis” or “cisgender” are considered slurs on this platform.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 21, 2023

cool cool cool

Great meeting you today @elonmusk! We had multifaceted conversations on issues ranging from energy to spirituality. https://t.co/r0mzwNbTyN pic.twitter.com/IVwOy5SlMV

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) June 21, 2023