I've more or less removed Twitter from my life. From my perspective, Twitter turns people into the worst versions of themselves and in some ways has gamified social interaction to the point of making toxic behaviour and witch hunts the default simply because it's the best way to "win points".
To quote WarGames, "the only winning move is not to play."
For the odd occasion when I do log on to Twitter, my rule is simple - if I see a tweet that annoys me or I just don't like, then I block them. I have no wish to spend any time or energy even allowing that stuff around me.
I don't agree. Twitter (and all social media) involve interacting with all kinds of people, and just a few of them can make it terrible, completely outside of your control. You can stay and fight by blocking or arguing or whatever, or just do something else.
Balancing what little value I ever got from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. -- all of which I have used, sometimes for years -- against the waste of time and anger and frustration, the trolls and sociopaths, the nonsense and lies, I decided not participating in those fake town squares and social clubs would reduce my stress and wasted time without any downside. And I don't have to worry about how my personal information or reading habits or social interactions get harvested, aggregated, sold, and ultimately used against me.
I don't use twitter, in fact, I deleted my account and created a new, blank account in case I got sent anything on Twitter. Twitter is, to me an ugly place dominated by cliques with everyone else trying to shout the loudest in the hopes of being noticed by said cliques.
I in no way feel safe or comfortable contributing to a platform that is that toxic and has a long track record of people trawling through every little thing you have ever said in the hopes of destroying your career and life.
And people who say the solution is to follow specific people or use certain ways of viewing your timeline underline the other problem which is if the platform requires me to make a significant time investment to get a non-toxic, non-awful experience, then I'd rather go without and be blissfully ignorant to anything happening on that platform.
I never really got into Twitter. I could never understand the point of posts limited to 140 characters and my severe lack of self esteem means I live my life believing that nothing I say is worth hearing or in any way remotely interesting.
In saying that, every time I've tried to "do" Twitter, I just find myself in this space where I feel a mix of sadness, anger, hatred and other negative emotions because 95% of Twitter is either people assuming the worst in everyone, calling other people every horrible name conceivable or just generally being another awful person in a sea of awful people.
The fact that I've never quite "got" Twitter has meant that I feel no attachment to it, and don't care if I remove it from my life, so it's not like I'm losing any sleep over it. But, it also helps immensely that removing Twitter from my life is like cutting off a necrotising limb that you never needed to begin with.
Among the best mental health decisions of my life is to get rid of Twitter from my everyday life. I still have an account (the only reason to delete it would be as a sign of protect, but I don't care, and Twitter doesn't care that I don't care). I do not visit the site on my own. There's just so much negativity, cruelty, and stupid thoughts. How can anyone post anything insightful, nuanced, and worth reading with such a character limit?
I realized that interesting tweets (or rather, Twitter threads) have a way of finding me through other means. That's the only time I visit Twitter.
I'm ok on missing out on ideas that do not find me through other means. The vomit to caviar ratio on Twitter is way too high.
Yep, I stopped using Twitter so I don't need them anymore but they were a godsend at avoiding internet drama and discourse I had no desire to engage in. You pick someone famous at the center of the drama and let the algo do its thing blocking them, all their followers, all their followers followers and so on. It's a coarse heuristic to be sure but operating on the principle that I can live without any given person's tweets it made discovery so much nicer.
In the last twelve months I have stopped using Twitter. It used to be fun but it just became a mess of marketing and moral posturing and bullying. It wasn't a conscious decision, it just happened.
It's like the photos of the woman scorned - the guy with his car trashed and clothes thrown out, he's probably getting back together with her after an apology. The guy with his stuff neatly folded and packed on the front is gone for good because she moved on.
It's one thing to think of a Twitter boycott over some issue like this, but when it fails to meet the standard of providing value so you just move on, well that's a lot worse for Twitter.
I'm not on Twitter but I know exactly what you mean. These days I check hackernews and a forum for a hobby I'm into and that's it. I'll read google news in the morning but I don't go too far (I stay away from opinion pieces).
it's just too toxic and I don't need that in my head.
Twitter taught me to suppress the impulse to react with snark to things or share only negative opinions. The app does incite these compulsions in me, but I've realized over time it's not just Twitter, I could stand to be a nicer person in general. Since then I only let myself post on Twitter if I have something neutral or nice to say. I don't always succeed but I think I've legit grown thanks to this and by extension to Twitter, however sad that sounds. People have a point when they say Twitter is a toxic place in general, but as an individual user, you have all the power to make your Twitter circle whatever you want it to be. It doesn't have to be that way for you.
I just canceled my Twitter account. I tried to stay far from it, because I know it's potentially addictive. I've had an account for a year, without posting anything. And I recently started to comment and argue with people. This thing is toxic (well, at least for me) and bring the worst out of people.
I have a reasonable twitter following (between 5-10k followers) and have recently realized that I needed to remove the app from my phone and only occasionally check it from time to time on a laptop. I'm considering giving it up all together.
I've struggled a bit with this decisions since I've made a fair number of real friends through twitter (people I keep up with in real life after) and come across a lot of interesting books, papers etc.
But I've come to realize that despite its benefits, twitter is ultimately toxic to your mind. I've seen far too many people I care about slowly dissolve into a fever of dopamine fixes as they slowly contort their personality into a stream of memes and rants looking to gain followers.
I always tried to fight the urge to post stupid shit just to grow followers, but anything genuinely nuanced or thoughtful you post will have virtually zero engagement. This is fine in isolation, but it leads all conversations to eventually degrade in to a miasma of garbage thinking that is just a mix of groupthink, rage and memes.
The final straw for me was finding myself angry about the vague opinions of people I don't really care about at all. This same type of thinking is what got me to drop facebook entirely years ago.
This exactly. I once tried the twitter game, I thought it was important to have a big following or say clever things, whatever.
I was lightly burned by a tweet (of my own authoring) once, and I thought "I make $XYZ per year, twitter pays me nothing, this joke tweet caused me a lot of stress, the odds that being on twitter will get me cancelled will cost me $XYZ are non-zero and I don't control them"
Then I deleted all my tweets and my twitter account (8 years ago) and life has been really nice without it!
Twitter/X enters the chat. I've deleted all social apps from my phone except Facebook, and the only reason I use that is to share photos with elderly relatives.
At least I don't get unsolicited racism and gore in my Facebook feed. Twitter on the other hand has been so utterly awful over the last two months that it finally pushed me to delete it everywhere. I don't go looking for that kind of stuff, yet somehow the Algorithm promotes it.
For me, it's very simple: visually and UX-wise, Twitter is a toxic hellstew. I'm no fan of Facebook (and I've since given up entirely on it), but at least I can pretty much figure out what's going on in most of my friends' lives today by scrolling down. With Twitter, I no longer scroll. I open it and give up almost immediately. There's no coherent thread through anything, it's just an unrelenting wash of unrelated complaints, marketing messages, ads, and racist/sexist nightmare fuel.
Twitter (and Facebook, for that matter) is a net loss for humanity, IMO.
I stopped using Twitter last summer and have had similar feelings as the author here.
It definitely warps your view of the world because it's biased towards certain types of posts. It's terrible for any nuanced discussion.
For me, I just got sick of people getting upset over everything and feeling they had to retweet or share everything that was upsetting. I get it that the world is an awful place, but it's draining to just keep seeing negative post after negative post. Even not engaging in the hot topic of the day can make you seem out of touch. And yes, you can choose not to care to engage in those things, but you get addicted to the engagement of twitter, trying to get more followers, more comments, more retweets, more likes, and on and on.
Unless you have some actual news or content to post, Twitter is best consumed passively and anonymously.
It’s real easy to not follow assholes on Twitter. Just don’t follow anybody who is posting BS. If someone’s tweets are irritating to you it’s not worth following them. Just block and move on. You’ll forget about them, and you won’t develop FOMO.
I’ve followed this rule since day 1 and I contend Twitter remains the BEST social platform.
Oh, I don't use Twitter. I set up a handful of accounts to look at information spread, for academic research purposes, and that was it. Once I learned nothing can be deleted, it was enough to deter me from the platform.
To quote WarGames, "the only winning move is not to play."
For the odd occasion when I do log on to Twitter, my rule is simple - if I see a tweet that annoys me or I just don't like, then I block them. I have no wish to spend any time or energy even allowing that stuff around me.
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