Goodbye, Twitter

I find myself posting on social media but not reading it.

Or for twitter I follow 3 people I aspire to be more like.

I had followed a fourth but too annoying so unfollowed.

The worst part was the feeling betrayal as I unfollowed personal friends and people I communicate with. Unfortunately even one like/retweet turns your profile into political garbage.

It bothers me a lot that the community I'm in is almost entirely centralized on Twitter and Telegram. There are independent sites that would become contact points in the event both went away, but it's friction, and people would lose touch. There was a much less online community that mostly met up at conventions, but those are shut down for the foreseeable future because of the mismanaged pandemic.

I always considered Twitter's standard of holding even private conversations in public and always publicly disclosing your follower/following graph extremely dangerous for privacy, and I wouldn't be surprised if the "public-by-default" also contributed to the toxic "Twitter mob" culture because when every communication is public, everyone on the platform is much more encouraged to virtue signal (or attack those who say something you don't like).

Unfortunately, even if you don't want to use Twitter, you're still affected by it. Aside from the risk of becoming the target of said mob, unfortunately, a large amount of public discourse and sometimes even official company or government announcements are only available through Twitter.

I've started using nitter.net for the unavoidable Twitter usage. It proides an alternative UI for reading Twitter which at least does away with some of the pressure to sign up to see tweets with replies/search, offers RSS, and doesn't require you to reload the page each time you click on a link because "something went wrong".

I'm not 100% sure their Tweet list is complete, and they're only as good as Twitter (i.e. if Twitter censors something, they still can't show it, the search for the banned hashtag is just as useless), but at least as a reader you're subject to a lot less of their dark patterns and hostile UX.

If you think that's bad, you should see what mobs of 'gender critical' people with an itchy report button do to trans women on there.

I read about half way through. Some valid arguments, and some not so valid (some clear misunderstanding of S.230), but it’s all worded such that it sounds like it’s coming from a right-wing nut with a chip on his shoulder (which brings the validity of the arguments several notches down).