> It was always something of a cesspool, and was a vehicle for political extremism of all shades.
Exactly. They should have left years ago since Twitter has always been an outrage machine and a bot laden cesspool riddled with CP spreading on the site. Still, many refused and tolerated the peak outrage for decades with no change.
Those who want more extreme content like that are free to go to their own federated echo chambers if they want to. Just not on Twitter anymore.
>I can’t say that Twitter was exactly an exception to this rule, for me. I never liked it enough to contribute my own content to it. I do like its userbase enough to have spent many hours reading it, over the last couple of years. That all came to a screeching halt in the last month or so, when it was acquired by a tyrant.
Oh my hyperbole, what would we do without you?!
>Then came the exodus from Twitter, due to the tyrannical new owner. Many of the voices that I have come to appreciate the most are leaving. In particular, the ones with the highest morals were the first to jump ship. As well they should! If you stay on Twitter, the way it is now, and continue to contribute your content to it, then you are saying that you approve of the tyrant-in-chief banning reporters for writing about things that make him look bad.
Oh my hyperbole! It's interesting to see the dichotomy between people who think Twitter was a safe haven and people who think it was a hellhole.
And you can both support that Elon Musk shouldn't have been so trigger happy banning reporters without a clear policy in place AND that doxxing should earn you an instantaneous and permanent ban.
>Why did I leave Twitter? My biggest fear about the Twitter acquisition had quickly become an incontrovertible reality: the new right-wing ownership group of Twitter intended to exploit the service to promote political propaganda.
The above is laughable. If you believe giving everyone an equal voice is a bad thing, then you need to reevaluate your position in society.
> My experience is that _while engaging in that maintenance_ Twitter rapidly depleted in utility and value for me, because the dark patterns that encourage outrage engagement infected all those that I follow. It's simply not possible, AFAICT, to actively filter Twitter for strong content and not eventually either recede into accepting outrage or reducing one's feed to uselessness.
I reached the same conclusion. It’s garbage, and I quit. Occasionally I’ll get a text from a friend linking to Twitter and I regret following the link, every time, within 60 seconds or so.
> It’s a cesspool of indignation, racism, faux wokeness
> I‘m not even sure I‘d consider Twitter worth saving.
Obviously the people who use it think it's worth using. Either way, the point isn't how bad Twitter is in your personal opinion, the point the author rightly makes is that it will get worse.
> What happened to the idea that you don't need to censor the people you don't like or they said a wrong thing? That if you expose their ideas to debate and truth that they will fall apart if they have no merit?
Thats not how twitter [1] works. You don't drive engagement by presenting people with uncomfortable facts that challenge their beliefs. You do it by creating echo chambers that re-enforce their predudices. Twitter doesnt care about free speech. It cares about revenue.
> Twitter is very toxic. It gives very dogmatic people an oversized cudgel to beat others over with.
Yeah, it's basically a distributed mechanism for organizing villagers with pitchforks and torches to burn witches, throw Jews down wells, or lynch blacks.
I do not think history is going to agree that this was a good idea.
> If you consider Twitter to be toxic, wait until you experience Mastodon.
I noticed this immediately on several Twitter alts I explored and immediately stopped using them. They were massive echo chambers and circle jerks. Some of them would even turn on each other and implode over incredibly minor things.
I remember message boards imploding in the early 2000s, but that usually took years, massive circles of people leaving, and changing of hands to achieve...this was like that on a speed run; and they mostly all went back to Twitter.
> I will leave Twitter forever[1] and it will be a pity.
Who cares and just leave.
Twitter is beyond repair and it will still just keep running to the ground regardless. Where it is currently going (unless Musk does something) it will never change and it will only get worse.
Also, who cares about Trump these days. He has his own platform anyway and even if he does get unbanned (which is highly unlikely) just block him and move on.
The Taliban, Khomeini, Putin and many other war criminals have Twitter accounts screeching on the platform and I don't see you complaining about leaving. (yet)
Better make that search for an alternative soon then.
> Maybe he thinks an unmoderated cesspool is better than a moderated cesspool. Either way, you're swimming in shit.
I'm sure he thinks that. Apparently he's a "free speech absolutist."
> Twitter not being a cesspool is an appealing fantasy, but only that.
It's not a binary condition. Twitter can be a cesspool with relatively more or relatively less shit. I'm sure his preference will result in relatively more shit.
Personally, I've appreciated a having society that lacks the shit Donald Trump created on Twitter.
> Meanwhile, I find that Twitter is actually a really useful platform if you carefully curate the people you follow.
Exactly this. If you put some effort into following and unfollowing people regularly and you're the type of person who can resist engaging with inflammatory content, Twitter can actually be quite nice.
But for the people who just can't scroll past ragebait or inflammatory Tweets, Twitter is not a good place to be. People who can't exercise self-restraint or shrug things off seem to get pulled into angry, combative bubbles. It's basically the old mailing list flamewars but with shorter content and faster pace. These people are better off staying clear of Twitter entirely.
> We are at a moment in time where public commitments to freedom if thought and speech ebb to a low.
> There are many culprits. I blame the transition of the public sphere from blogs to Twitter.
The difference between Twitter and the old blogosphere was that the latter was primarily communities that shared background assumptions and were mostly arguing in good faith. Twitter isn’t like that. If you have lots of followers many of them will be doing so to keep tabs on communities they’re not part of. Some of them will be hate follows. So an awful lot of the Twitter experience is of constant exposure to people who hate you and your ideas and wish you harm, who argue in bad faith, are dishonest or stupid, or whose background assumptions are so different from yours that their actions cannot be distinguished from malice.
>However I don't think anything can save twitter from being a toxic platform. What makes it especially toxic, I think, is its lack of separation of communities.
I don't find Twitter any more or less toxic than any other platform, and it's because I'm free to participate in the communities I choose. If the people you follow are constantly talking politics, and that annoys you, why are you following them?
> What I find troubling is that despite containing the same cesspool of vile content, Twitter never got booted from Google and Apple App stores, and AWS.
The difference being that on Parler the 'cesspool' as you call it is all there is, or at least it is the main attraction.
On Twitter it is easy enough to find, but an average user mostly does have to go looking for it, or at least be following someone who goes looking for it. Twitter also does make efforts to drain the cesspool, although it can certainly be debated whether those efforts are sufficient or even being made in good faith.
> I could delete twitter, but that's essentially like blocking everyone on it.
Yeah, it's great. Twitter has nothing to do with reality, it's a shared delusion between a bunch of people that hate each other. You won't miss a thing.
> This whole situation feels messy and gross but I think they’re absolutely right that Twitter has massively overstepped what would reasonably be considered moderation.
On the contrary, Twitter has repeatedly failed to enforce their own rules/TOS, primarily to benefit a single extremist political faction.
Exactly. They should have left years ago since Twitter has always been an outrage machine and a bot laden cesspool riddled with CP spreading on the site. Still, many refused and tolerated the peak outrage for decades with no change.
Those who want more extreme content like that are free to go to their own federated echo chambers if they want to. Just not on Twitter anymore.
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