i quit twitter after years of using it when i got exhausted of having to see political tweets from anyone i was following in tech. i just want to follow certain topics, but unfortunately the mute feature is not enough to filter out all the crap
I did the same thing with trying to avoiding politics and entertainment, and just following programmers and development thought leaders. Yeah... They almost all wind up being political too. I simply cannot find a way to find interesting accounts that don't wind up talking about politics and current events. I don't care. I don't want to use Twitter for that, but apparently, Twitter doesn't want me to use the service for anything ELSE. (And, before someone suggests it, yes, my list of muted words is already long.)
Twitter use to be a place to find folks of common interests, but its been flooded with political and other highly annoying topics that I prefer to avoid. Sadly, there's not good way to filter out the content and they keep flooding you with it :(
R.I.P Twitter for me; haven't touched it in over 2 years.
I quit Twitter in 2015 when my supposedly level-headed friends (most of whom are fellow software engineers) lost their minds and switched to posting only about politics. Twitter immediately lost all utility. To me, politics has little to do with good governance, and is thus a kind of misinformation or spam. I opted right out of all that. I’ve been much happier ever since.
You can't escape it, sooner or later someone you follow will start reblogging or talking politics and then you just end up playing the mute game.
Every time something happens political I find myself having to mute all sorts of things, peoples names, places, etc.
I used to only really use RSS but then when Google effectively killed it everyone (who were already twitter addicts) just told us "Just move to Twitter, whats the big deal?", now to get the same content I used to enjoy I have to sit through endless political hot takes and arguing.
Then Tumblr took a turn for the worse and everyone cried the same thing, "Just move to Twitter, whats the big deal?"
Twitter is unusable if you want to avoid Politics. I unfriended almost everyone but all it takes is a single Like from anyone and it's Politics galore.
Twitter could be great if you could truly tune-out the stuff you don't want to see.
For a long time I held onto my account, trying to mute anything part of SJW or communist discourse, but to no avail. Twitter shows you stuff you didn't sign up for anyway, I suppose to maximise engagement.
ironically one of the reasons i've entertained the idea of quitting twitter is b/c of annoying things that showed up in my feed from the author(and others). But I just un-followed him instead. the technical things I'm interested in, but I dont care for the politics so much.
Twitter has been boring at least as long as Facebook. I quit once my feed of what used to be casual acquaintances I met at tech conferences turned into an unavoidable stream of rage-bait sanctimonious bs; a long time ago at this point.
I use a third-party Twitter client TweetBot on both iOS and MacOS, and all I see are the folks I follow and any retweets they do. And that's it. No suggested tweets to rile and inflame and engage me. I only see what I want to see.
And if one particular person I follow gets too verbose, I mute them for 6 hours, a day, a week, or forever, until they calm down. I've even permanently muted acquaintances who it makes them happy to think I follow them as they go off the deep end.
If Twitter takes away the API that TweetBot uses, well, I think that'll be my exit, since I can't imagine having to put up with what I perceive everyone else is experiencing on Twitter.
I have partially removed all my social networks except Twitter. I want to find out about things in real time, and from various sources, therefore Twitter is still a valid medium for this purpose. Although I interact little in the discussions.
Leaving Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and other networks gave me automatic anxiety relief. I no longer care what anyone close to me thinks and I don't get into discussions with close relatives.
My life as a conservative is much better without social networks where they censor me non-stop, just Twitter and being very careful with what I write and how I write it I can more or less start conversations. Sooner or later I will leave Twitter too, it is a matter of finding another social network, free and open and nurtured by people.
X/Twitter is supposed to be the free speech platform.
A course I’m taking told students to post daily updates there for some accountability and community. I signed up to do that. I followed some normal stuff as part of the onboarding (some tech people, some local news, a couple podcasters… only 17 people) and the “for you” feed it gave me is nightmare fuel. To be fair, I turned off the content filters, as I do on every site, but it’s usually not that bad. I’m thinking of turning the filters back on to see what that looks like. So far it hasn’t really been a community I want to get invested in. Not to mention the comments on posts are littered with completely unrelated posts. A 3rd party app would go a long way, but like Reddit, Twitter killed that off.
I just routinely block any political page (of any kind) that someone shares, and have unfollowed anyone who feels the need to go on political rants more than once or twice a week (including, sadly, some family members and long-time friends).
I mean, by this point I get it that they like (or don't like) Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Message received.
While I won't unfriend someone over politics (unless they start insulting me), I will unfollow them. If they want to waste their own time ranting on Facebook, it's their business, but I've stopped letting them waste mine.
Twitter is, of course, much worse. I don't understand how anyone can believe that Twitter's format is suitable for serious political discussion, but many people apparently do. I quit Twitter a long time ago.
I stopped using it, mainly because of an “inverse network effect”. Twitter used to be a useful place to keep up on scientific papers. Science Twitter is dead. Now my feed is like 10 percent science, 10 mildly racist / inflammatory content, 10 percent miscellaneous, and 70 percent a certain VC constantly shaking his fist, yelling about crypto, and shitting on fiat currency. And this is after aggressively curating my feed by unfollowing anybody who cheered on Musk’s takeover of Twitter. No thanks.
I also quit Twitter a long time ago. Unlike OP I don’t feel I’ve missed out on any important conversations. Twitter is awful at being a communication platform.
There’s no concept of on-topic or off-topic, so in order to get the little morsel of useful information you have to wade through political arguments, pictures of pets and who knows what else. Using Twitter feels like a chore.
In place of Twitter I use discord, various programming subreddits, HN, and I get way more exposure to important information when it’s not hidden amongst every shade of anger and banality.
I kept Instagram to follow just some athletes I like, but I am increasingly thinking about killing Twitter too. I follow a very small group of people, mostly C# developers, but keeping a restricted pool of people alone does not warrant immunity from the incessant political battage of somebody's agenda, fough retweet after retweet, of which I want none.
I do really think Twitter is the most stressful of all. Nowadays there's no longer a sane discussion without this or that party injecting politics into even the most meaningless of debates.
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