have you quit twitter yet?

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

That sounds good, sadly all I've read is the "is knowing what the Odyssey is privilege?" discourse which has been pretty funny but not so illuminating

Multiple truths.

bluesky is just too boring, i keep forgetting it exists and not opening the app for multiple days in a row. twitter sucks but at least it’s addictive

all the best apps are the ones you forget exist and never open, thus increasing your quality of life.

Yeah but I like my vices to be sucky and addictive

Music and history people are on Bluesky and I just want to talk about music and history, also lots of gay and trans stuff which isn't exactly me but makes me feel comfortable to be around. Just follow music accounts and block all the resistance libs / #FBPE crowd and you can have my nice only moderately addictive and not sucky experience.

Actually Bluesky is getting a bit better as there is just more people but without that engagement by annoyance that many platforms go for (from an insecurity that the product isn't enough on its own).

Wonder if Bluesky now is what twitter was like in the early days! Low-ish engagement but 'wholesome'?

Watching Dr Louks be on twitter and thriving is inspiring.

Guys, I adore your enthusiasm towards reading my thesis, but please stop requesting it on the university’s depository. I can’t lift the embargo as publishers prefer/require it and I’ve been getting hundreds of emails per day for over a month. I’m really sorry!

— Dr Ally Louks (@DrAllyLouks) December 30, 2024

good for her, I guess. I think I am better off not spending much time thinking about Twitter main characters.

There are like 3-5 people on Twitter who are both still posting and whose posts I still want to see. Sadly I feel I need to keep it to receive the odd DM for music stuff.

Zero compulsion to look at bluesky, which is good. I actually like it solely as a place to put random thoughts that have no place elsewhere and they no one will ever see.

I remember when Twitter was like that, a sort of word hole that nobody I knew used. I used to post on it when high or whatever, then around 2014 I started a new job and my boss was mega into Twitter and asked what my handle was on my first day. Had to go and delete a load of shit before giving it to him.

I got Twitter in early 2009, linked it to my phone number and "post by SMS" (dunno when they got rid of that) - then I moved back to China, my phone number expired, someone else got it. So when family members tagged me in something this person would get a text message, assume it was spam and reply to it with "FUCK OFF" - which would then be posted as a reply on Twitter. Eventually my mum asked me gently about it and I had to get a new VPN and try to figure out wtf was going on. Not sure any of them believed me when I explained it.

lmao

at some point years ago I forgot my username and twitter wouldn’t let me recover my password without it.