6 ms·

How to Gradually Exit Twitter

65 points by saadalem 6y ago

Ijumfs 6y ago
When I left Twitter a couple years ago, I "slammed the door on my way out" by deleting all my posts. Of course, we all know social media companies keep deleted posts and metadata but crawlers probably can't see this data (unless they pay?) and it sends a message as well.
geofft 6y ago
I had a blog (still do, though I publish extremely infrequently), but the value of Twitter to me is the discussions, where I can ask about things and learn new things from people who reply to them. What's the equivalent for that in this system? Now, if you said "get a personal domain and set up ActivityPub," then sure. The other approach I've liked here is the "planet" model - I read https://planet.debian.org/ https://planet.debian.org/ fairly frequently, and occasionally one blogger publishes something and a couple of people follow up a day or two later "This is a response to so-and-so's post, here are my thoughts," which is always fun. But it wouldn't be fun in a newsletter model - Twitter makes it so that you don't see replies from someone you follow to someone you don't, because those replies will generally lack context. I wouldn't want to spam everyone in my newsletter with "These are some questions I have for some other person whose newsletter you don't read."
- jasonpbecker 6y ago
  Writing blogs, and writing response to blogs, is a significantly better mechanism for most conversation on the web. Short posts, and replies, have all the problems that comments have had all along. Still, short posts are great, and represent probably 90% of my own blogging. Webmentions/ActivityPub are great starts to getting all of this tied together better.
- riffic 6y ago
  Just a quick plug for two ActivityPub projects that are wholly compelling and are not Mastodon: * WordPress ActivityPub plugin by Matthias Pfefferle: https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ * WriteFreely - An open source platform for building a writing space on the web: https://writefreely.org/ https://writefreely.org/
songshuu 6y ago
A worthwhile question to ask is why is this being written now? Twitter has had hacks before, so I don't buy the 'hacks are the last straw' line.
- remolacha 6y ago
  I don’t think this is because of the hack. Balaji seems more worried about censorship and “cancel culture.” Ex: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/n7w3zw/silicon-valley-elite-discuss-journalists-having-too-much-power-in-private-app https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/n7w3zw/silicon-valley-eli...
  - SyneRyder 6y ago
    Quoting Vice in that article, defending journalists: "many journalistic outlets are increasingly moving away from an ad-based revenue model driven by traffic, and instead ... optioning their articles to movie studios ..." Emphasis mine, but I can't believe Vice admits their business model is creating stories they can turn into Hollywood films. That doesn't align with reporting the truth. "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story". But that does explain a lot. Bloomberg's "The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies" was totally unsubstantiated garbage, but it does sound like a plotline from a Hollywood movie.
    - topicseed 6y ago
      True. Though the bottom line is publishers saying "we need to get money somehow", and readers mostly not enthused by paying for a subscription. So if it's not ads and the often-paired click bait, it has to be something else, itself paired with something else. I definitely do not condone that, especially for outlets present to inform the general public, but they're businesses after all.
    - secondcoming 6y ago
      The only part of Vice that's worth giving the benefit of the doubt when it comes to The Truth is their Motherboard section. The rest has been tripe for a few years. There was a glimmer of hope with Simon Ostrovsky's reporting from Ukraine, but he seems to have moved on.
acidburnNSA 6y ago
The addictive value of twitter is that you can ping some quasi-famous person in your field and they will often engage in conversation. It's pretty magical. That's not gonna happen on my paid mailing list.
- znpy 6y ago
  Actually, if a quasi-famous person happens to be in a mailing list (I'm talking abou mailing lists, not newsletters) then it might answer your emails and participate in a conversation.
  - acidburnNSA 6y ago
    The mailing lists I'm on almost always get relegated to a filtered folder where loads of things irrelevant to me come by (e.g. user support). Maybe I'm just on the wrong mailing lists, but the ability to subscribe, ignore, and boost threads is pretty valuable.
    - znpy 6y ago
      so... 1. mailing lists are noisy and 2. you don't check them very often. regarding 1. isn't twitter noisy too? regarding 2. can you really blame this on the mailing lists?
- gkoberger 6y ago
  Or, to put it another way – this advice is for "famous" people like Balaji, and is untenable for most people on Twitter. Twitter is different because everyone can both send and receive from the same account. This advice isn't for normal people, but rather for people who want to build an audience in a one-way-direction.
techslave 6y ago
how to abruptly exit twitter: quit
jamesvandyne 6y ago
I've not quit Twitter, but I've reduced my usage of it (and gained control of my data) by syndicating my posts/statuses from to Twitter and backfeeding any replies/likes as comments on my blog. It's all simple enough to get setup using the IndieWeb Wordpress plugin.
jasonpbecker 6y ago
Kind of silly to insist on a newsletter versus a blog and direct folks to a $30 a month service. You can get a free blog on Tumblr or Wordpress.org. You can get one for $5 at somewhere like Micro.blog. There's plenty of ways to setup a personal blog that works well for both long posts and short posts. All of those have mechanisms to crosspost to social media or turn into a newsletter, if you want. But the focus on that solution is silly-- the open web is here, it's great, and blogs are a solid technology. RSS works well and makes it easy to syndicate all over. I am personally quite happy using Micro.blog for my blog [micro.json.blog](https://micro.json.blog https://micro.json.blog). It's hosted Hugo (which is what I used for my blog before) setup with a micropub service already and hooked into most of the tech and standards coming through the Indieweb movement. Blogs are the answer to twitter. Newsletters are just a potential answer to monetization for a limited set of folks.
- closeparen 6y ago
  If your audience is hardcore HN readers, this is true. Most normal people have an email address but not an RSS reader. And without that a blog is a completely different thing, requiring you to actively check it. Newsletters can also make things not-completely-public without a user account system.
  - jasonpbecker 6y ago
    That's true that most people don't have an RSS reader. It's also true that: 1. Most people don't want your newsletter in their inbox. 2. Most people still find content on social media. 3. RSS _as a technology_ can be used to syndicate to both newsletters and social media. That's why I think POSSE[^1] is the right, powerful concept. On "not-completely-public" content-- I don't think that this post, and most of the "leave Twitter/Facebook" posts are directed at the small number of private accounts-- private accounts don't have the same discovery problem. The exception is if you're talking about "not-completely-public" for the purposes of monetization. To that I say: 1. Twitter doesn't solve that; 2. That's a completely different problem; 3. A blog, syndicated to social media, is still probably the best tool to enable new people to discover your content. Any number of mechanisms, whether Patreon, Locals, Substack, Mailchimp, Memberful, Github Donations, and on and on may make sense for monetization. Wordpress and Tumblr also have built in mechanisms for monetization. But people aren't using Twitter for gated content that folks pay for-- that's just moving the goal posts. [^1]: https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE
phoe-krk 6y ago
Switching to the Fediverse is also an option, especially since the variety of instances there means that one can curate their experience in a much greater way than one would on Twitter.
- zimpenfish 6y ago
  > Switching to the Fediverse is also an option Really only if the people you want to interact with on Twitter are either already on the Fediverse or can be persuaded to move across. In my experience, they're not and they won't be. Which is why I still have an active Twitter account.
- pizzicato 6y ago
  fosstodon.org is a great instance that I imagine would suit the HN crowd.
gherkinnn 6y ago
Twitter really is just poison. I visit it once a week and exclusively follow programming related accounts. Even then I feel misanthropy and disgust seep in to my head. Something inherent to Twitter makes it such a horrible place. Is it the character limit? Me always seeing what everyone reposts/likes? The way the feed is built? No idea. But I hate it. And the worst part? It gives me very little in return. The occasional sneak peak at a products’ road map or strategy. Maybe release notes all in one place.
- mnd999 6y ago
  Fundamentally the tendency towards short posts prevents any nuance or complexity and reduces everything to black and white. This is a poor model for the realities of the world.
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    People seem to lap it up though. Most Twitter accounts consistently post snappy 1-2 sentence blunt statements and I'm always surprised at the responses.
- larrywright 6y ago
  I was on twitter early - user id is 10,000 something. It wasn’t always like this. Back in the early days it was amazing. I learned so much by following people who were doing interesting things on technology. Over the past 6 years or so it’s become angry and toxic. The current political situation doesn’t help but it was bad before that. I’m not sure what the cause was or if it’s repairable. I do know I miss the twitter of 10 years ago.
frogpelt 6y ago
Gradual exits are for the birds (that tweet). You can still read twitter without an account. Just delete your account(s) cold turkey.
gkoberger 6y ago
I understand the negative opinions about Twitter that have been mentioned, but this isn't advice for _most_ people. This is advice for people who already have an audience built, and are looking to own their audience. The benefit (and downfall) of Twitter is that (blue checkmark aside), everyone is equal. Your account can both send and receive, and it puts everyone on the same 280-character level playing field. Balaji doesn't like this. Balaji might want to pick up his ball and leave, and that's fine (odd he blames the hacks and not his recent Twitter spat, but whatever). But Twitter has managed to give a voice to so many people and ideas that otherwise never would have been heard. This doesn't solve that problem; it just makes it so Balaji can write what he wants without having to hear people disagree with him. If you're reading this and are against Twitter, that's fair! But it's likely that you and Balaji are looking to exit Twitter for very different reasons.
blueyes 6y ago
How does this post address network effects in the age of aggregation? Who has sufficient incentive to tie all those disparate blogs and newsletters together? Balaji likes to talk about exit plans. See this speech at YC startup school: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A In general, they strike me as deeply unrealistic.
snowwrestler 6y ago
Getting someone to leave a social media platform like Twitter voluntarily is probably just as good as getting them kicked off. Either way they lose access to the potential for rapid audience expansion that is enabled by the dynamics of the platform. Sure, they can service their core audience on any publishing platform: an email newsletter, a blog, etc. But it's much much harder to get a rapid audience expansion in one of those channels. That's why they were on Twitter in the first place, instead of (or in addition to) emails and blogs. It's not like email newsletters and blogs are some new untested idea; they both predate Twitter by almost a decade. Twitter (and other social platforms) has succeeded because it offers upside that those don't. People love that big audience pop on social media when it helps them quickly build their brand or find new customers. They don't love it when it exposes them to a larger set of critics. Going to less dynamic channels is one way to lower the volume of criticism, but you lose the potential for positive dynamics as well.
- auganov 6y ago
  No, the problem is you have to discount that audience by the risk of it getting destroyed overnight by an unsympathetic Twitter admin/moderator. And by the high difficulty of cashing it out. And by deboosting algorithms that will limit your reach. Accounting for this, I don't think it's a stretch to say that having 1,000 people on a platform you control is much better than 10,000 Twitter "followers". Maybe even 100,000 depending on how much Twitter likes you.
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    > you have to discount that audience by the risk of it getting destroyed overnight by an unsympathetic Twitter admin/moderator While I have a lot of issues with Twitter, statistically speaking, the chances of this happening seem to be very, very, very small. Twitter is not full of rogue "moderators" running rampant permanently deleting people's accounts left and right. You have to be (a) willfully spreading material that clearly violates Twitter's terms of service (cf. Alex Jones), (b) ignoring repeated warnings and essentially daring Twitter to enforce their own TOS (cf. Alex Jones), and in most cases, (c) high profile (cf. Alex Jones). It's easy to find people who are temporarily banned from Twitter for dubious/spurious reasons, but it's pretty hard to find people who are punted without warning for "going against the groupthink, man."
Funes- 6y ago
To my mind, trying this hard to circumvent a platform's huge and seemingly irremovable flaws instead of ditching it for good is a very unreasonable option. I'd say quit Twitter abruptly, not gradually--here's how: - Do you want to follow the news? Try selecting reliable news outlets or aggregators (like HN) guided by your own criteria, so you can check their websites on a regular basis and stay up to date, if you're interested in that--I'd personally recommend sticking to local news. - Do you want to follow specific people that publish content you find interesting on the Internet? Follow their personal websites or repositories. - Do you want to publish content on the Internet yourself? Host a personal website. If you don't want to pay, consider using a decentralized option (Beaker Browser, .onion site, I2P, ZeroNet, etcetera). That's it. Goodbye social media. RSS, bookmarks, and our good old memory are our best allies.
- acidburnNSA 6y ago
  What if I want to ping the most famous researcher in my field and get a quick response? And then get recruited by an observer for asking such an insightful question? This actually happens on twitter.
  - motohagiography 6y ago
    Arguably this is analogous to asking how will you hit a payout on a slot machine if you don't play. It sort of makes sense if as someone who plays slot machines literally has no more productive use for their capital than the sensation of losing it and the hope from occasionally "winning," just as someone on twitter has no more productive use of their surplus time. Sure, it's fun, and you can take it to the bathroom with you so you don't need to wear a diaper like you might need to at a casino, but it's an impoverishing and inferior vice. Twitter and social media platforms that we compare to slot machines should be defined as a new form or class called Strange Games, wherein the only winning move is not to play.
    - acidburnNSA 6y ago
      I disagree only because I've had real contacts with personal giants on twitter dozens of times and never won anything at a casino. While I do spend more time on twitter, I believe this effect is more common than your analogy allows. People into fringe academic topics are likely to see this effect more than people @ing along and kanye.
scottmsul 6y ago
The technology should exist by now for a decentralized twitter right? Resorting to email newsletters seems very clunky. Couldn't there be something that uses a bittorrent-like protocol, where the followers support the network for whomever they're following?
- riffic 6y ago
  The W3C published ActivityPub as a recommendation (this is essentially a web standard) on January 23, 2018.
goldforever 6y ago
Everyone just maintain their own Mastodon servers!
unicornporn 6y ago
https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ ?

65 points by saadalem 6y ago

When I left Twitter a couple years ago, I "slammed the door on my way out" by deleting all my posts. Of course, we all know social media companies keep deleted posts and metadata but crawlers probably can't see this data (unless they pay?) and it sends a message as well.

geofft 6y ago

I had a blog (still do, though I publish extremely infrequently), but the value of Twitter to me is the discussions, where I can ask about things and learn new things from people who reply to them. What's the equivalent for that in this system? Now, if you said "get a personal domain and set up ActivityPub," then sure. The other approach I've liked here is the "planet" model - I read https://planet.debian.org/ https://planet.debian.org/ fairly frequently, and occasionally one blogger publishes something and a couple of people follow up a day or two later "This is a response to so-and-so's post, here are my thoughts," which is always fun. But it wouldn't be fun in a newsletter model - Twitter makes it so that you don't see replies from someone you follow to someone you don't, because those replies will generally lack context. I wouldn't want to spam everyone in my newsletter with "These are some questions I have for some other person whose newsletter you don't read."

jasonpbecker 6y ago
Writing blogs, and writing response to blogs, is a significantly better mechanism for most conversation on the web. Short posts, and replies, have all the problems that comments have had all along. Still, short posts are great, and represent probably 90% of my own blogging. Webmentions/ActivityPub are great starts to getting all of this tied together better.
riffic 6y ago
Just a quick plug for two ActivityPub projects that are wholly compelling and are not Mastodon: * WordPress ActivityPub plugin by Matthias Pfefferle: https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ * WriteFreely - An open source platform for building a writing space on the web: https://writefreely.org/ https://writefreely.org/

songshuu 6y ago

A worthwhile question to ask is why is this being written now? Twitter has had hacks before, so I don't buy the 'hacks are the last straw' line.

remolacha 6y ago
I don’t think this is because of the hack. Balaji seems more worried about censorship and “cancel culture.” Ex: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/n7w3zw/silicon-valley-elite-discuss-journalists-having-too-much-power-in-private-app https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/n7w3zw/silicon-valley-eli...
- SyneRyder 6y ago
  Quoting Vice in that article, defending journalists: "many journalistic outlets are increasingly moving away from an ad-based revenue model driven by traffic, and instead ... optioning their articles to movie studios ..." Emphasis mine, but I can't believe Vice admits their business model is creating stories they can turn into Hollywood films. That doesn't align with reporting the truth. "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story". But that does explain a lot. Bloomberg's "The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies" was totally unsubstantiated garbage, but it does sound like a plotline from a Hollywood movie.
  - topicseed 6y ago
    True. Though the bottom line is publishers saying "we need to get money somehow", and readers mostly not enthused by paying for a subscription. So if it's not ads and the often-paired click bait, it has to be something else, itself paired with something else. I definitely do not condone that, especially for outlets present to inform the general public, but they're businesses after all.
  - secondcoming 6y ago
    The only part of Vice that's worth giving the benefit of the doubt when it comes to The Truth is their Motherboard section. The rest has been tripe for a few years. There was a glimmer of hope with Simon Ostrovsky's reporting from Ukraine, but he seems to have moved on.

acidburnNSA 6y ago

The addictive value of twitter is that you can ping some quasi-famous person in your field and they will often engage in conversation. It's pretty magical. That's not gonna happen on my paid mailing list.

znpy 6y ago
Actually, if a quasi-famous person happens to be in a mailing list (I'm talking abou mailing lists, not newsletters) then it might answer your emails and participate in a conversation.
- acidburnNSA 6y ago
  The mailing lists I'm on almost always get relegated to a filtered folder where loads of things irrelevant to me come by (e.g. user support). Maybe I'm just on the wrong mailing lists, but the ability to subscribe, ignore, and boost threads is pretty valuable.
  - znpy 6y ago
    so... 1. mailing lists are noisy and 2. you don't check them very often. regarding 1. isn't twitter noisy too? regarding 2. can you really blame this on the mailing lists?
gkoberger 6y ago
Or, to put it another way – this advice is for "famous" people like Balaji, and is untenable for most people on Twitter. Twitter is different because everyone can both send and receive from the same account. This advice isn't for normal people, but rather for people who want to build an audience in a one-way-direction.

techslave 6y ago

how to abruptly exit twitter: quit

jamesvandyne 6y ago

I've not quit Twitter, but I've reduced my usage of it (and gained control of my data) by syndicating my posts/statuses from to Twitter and backfeeding any replies/likes as comments on my blog. It's all simple enough to get setup using the IndieWeb Wordpress plugin.

jasonpbecker 6y ago

Kind of silly to insist on a newsletter versus a blog and direct folks to a $30 a month service. You can get a free blog on Tumblr or Wordpress.org. You can get one for $5 at somewhere like Micro.blog. There's plenty of ways to setup a personal blog that works well for both long posts and short posts. All of those have mechanisms to crosspost to social media or turn into a newsletter, if you want. But the focus on that solution is silly-- the open web is here, it's great, and blogs are a solid technology. RSS works well and makes it easy to syndicate all over. I am personally quite happy using Micro.blog for my blog [micro.json.blog](https://micro.json.blog https://micro.json.blog). It's hosted Hugo (which is what I used for my blog before) setup with a micropub service already and hooked into most of the tech and standards coming through the Indieweb movement. Blogs are the answer to twitter. Newsletters are just a potential answer to monetization for a limited set of folks.

closeparen 6y ago
If your audience is hardcore HN readers, this is true. Most normal people have an email address but not an RSS reader. And without that a blog is a completely different thing, requiring you to actively check it. Newsletters can also make things not-completely-public without a user account system.
- jasonpbecker 6y ago
  That's true that most people don't have an RSS reader. It's also true that: 1. Most people don't want your newsletter in their inbox. 2. Most people still find content on social media. 3. RSS _as a technology_ can be used to syndicate to both newsletters and social media. That's why I think POSSE[^1] is the right, powerful concept. On "not-completely-public" content-- I don't think that this post, and most of the "leave Twitter/Facebook" posts are directed at the small number of private accounts-- private accounts don't have the same discovery problem. The exception is if you're talking about "not-completely-public" for the purposes of monetization. To that I say: 1. Twitter doesn't solve that; 2. That's a completely different problem; 3. A blog, syndicated to social media, is still probably the best tool to enable new people to discover your content. Any number of mechanisms, whether Patreon, Locals, Substack, Mailchimp, Memberful, Github Donations, and on and on may make sense for monetization. Wordpress and Tumblr also have built in mechanisms for monetization. But people aren't using Twitter for gated content that folks pay for-- that's just moving the goal posts. [^1]: https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE

phoe-krk 6y ago

Switching to the Fediverse is also an option, especially since the variety of instances there means that one can curate their experience in a much greater way than one would on Twitter.

zimpenfish 6y ago
> Switching to the Fediverse is also an option Really only if the people you want to interact with on Twitter are either already on the Fediverse or can be persuaded to move across. In my experience, they're not and they won't be. Which is why I still have an active Twitter account.
pizzicato 6y ago
fosstodon.org is a great instance that I imagine would suit the HN crowd.

gherkinnn 6y ago

Twitter really is just poison. I visit it once a week and exclusively follow programming related accounts. Even then I feel misanthropy and disgust seep in to my head. Something inherent to Twitter makes it such a horrible place. Is it the character limit? Me always seeing what everyone reposts/likes? The way the feed is built? No idea. But I hate it. And the worst part? It gives me very little in return. The occasional sneak peak at a products’ road map or strategy. Maybe release notes all in one place.

mnd999 6y ago
Fundamentally the tendency towards short posts prevents any nuance or complexity and reduces everything to black and white. This is a poor model for the realities of the world.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  People seem to lap it up though. Most Twitter accounts consistently post snappy 1-2 sentence blunt statements and I'm always surprised at the responses.
larrywright 6y ago
I was on twitter early - user id is 10,000 something. It wasn’t always like this. Back in the early days it was amazing. I learned so much by following people who were doing interesting things on technology. Over the past 6 years or so it’s become angry and toxic. The current political situation doesn’t help but it was bad before that. I’m not sure what the cause was or if it’s repairable. I do know I miss the twitter of 10 years ago.

frogpelt 6y ago

Gradual exits are for the birds (that tweet). You can still read twitter without an account. Just delete your account(s) cold turkey.

gkoberger 6y ago

I understand the negative opinions about Twitter that have been mentioned, but this isn't advice for _most_ people. This is advice for people who already have an audience built, and are looking to own their audience. The benefit (and downfall) of Twitter is that (blue checkmark aside), everyone is equal. Your account can both send and receive, and it puts everyone on the same 280-character level playing field. Balaji doesn't like this. Balaji might want to pick up his ball and leave, and that's fine (odd he blames the hacks and not his recent Twitter spat, but whatever). But Twitter has managed to give a voice to so many people and ideas that otherwise never would have been heard. This doesn't solve that problem; it just makes it so Balaji can write what he wants without having to hear people disagree with him. If you're reading this and are against Twitter, that's fair! But it's likely that you and Balaji are looking to exit Twitter for very different reasons.

blueyes 6y ago

How does this post address network effects in the age of aggregation? Who has sufficient incentive to tie all those disparate blogs and newsletters together? Balaji likes to talk about exit plans. See this speech at YC startup school: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A In general, they strike me as deeply unrealistic.

snowwrestler 6y ago

Getting someone to leave a social media platform like Twitter voluntarily is probably just as good as getting them kicked off. Either way they lose access to the potential for rapid audience expansion that is enabled by the dynamics of the platform. Sure, they can service their core audience on any publishing platform: an email newsletter, a blog, etc. But it's much much harder to get a rapid audience expansion in one of those channels. That's why they were on Twitter in the first place, instead of (or in addition to) emails and blogs. It's not like email newsletters and blogs are some new untested idea; they both predate Twitter by almost a decade. Twitter (and other social platforms) has succeeded because it offers upside that those don't. People love that big audience pop on social media when it helps them quickly build their brand or find new customers. They don't love it when it exposes them to a larger set of critics. Going to less dynamic channels is one way to lower the volume of criticism, but you lose the potential for positive dynamics as well.

auganov 6y ago
No, the problem is you have to discount that audience by the risk of it getting destroyed overnight by an unsympathetic Twitter admin/moderator. And by the high difficulty of cashing it out. And by deboosting algorithms that will limit your reach. Accounting for this, I don't think it's a stretch to say that having 1,000 people on a platform you control is much better than 10,000 Twitter "followers". Maybe even 100,000 depending on how much Twitter likes you.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  > you have to discount that audience by the risk of it getting destroyed overnight by an unsympathetic Twitter admin/moderator While I have a lot of issues with Twitter, statistically speaking, the chances of this happening seem to be very, very, very small. Twitter is not full of rogue "moderators" running rampant permanently deleting people's accounts left and right. You have to be (a) willfully spreading material that clearly violates Twitter's terms of service (cf. Alex Jones), (b) ignoring repeated warnings and essentially daring Twitter to enforce their own TOS (cf. Alex Jones), and in most cases, (c) high profile (cf. Alex Jones). It's easy to find people who are temporarily banned from Twitter for dubious/spurious reasons, but it's pretty hard to find people who are punted without warning for "going against the groupthink, man."

Funes- 6y ago

To my mind, trying this hard to circumvent a platform's huge and seemingly irremovable flaws instead of ditching it for good is a very unreasonable option. I'd say quit Twitter abruptly, not gradually--here's how: - Do you want to follow the news? Try selecting reliable news outlets or aggregators (like HN) guided by your own criteria, so you can check their websites on a regular basis and stay up to date, if you're interested in that--I'd personally recommend sticking to local news. - Do you want to follow specific people that publish content you find interesting on the Internet? Follow their personal websites or repositories. - Do you want to publish content on the Internet yourself? Host a personal website. If you don't want to pay, consider using a decentralized option (Beaker Browser, .onion site, I2P, ZeroNet, etcetera). That's it. Goodbye social media. RSS, bookmarks, and our good old memory are our best allies.

acidburnNSA 6y ago
What if I want to ping the most famous researcher in my field and get a quick response? And then get recruited by an observer for asking such an insightful question? This actually happens on twitter.
- motohagiography 6y ago
  Arguably this is analogous to asking how will you hit a payout on a slot machine if you don't play. It sort of makes sense if as someone who plays slot machines literally has no more productive use for their capital than the sensation of losing it and the hope from occasionally "winning," just as someone on twitter has no more productive use of their surplus time. Sure, it's fun, and you can take it to the bathroom with you so you don't need to wear a diaper like you might need to at a casino, but it's an impoverishing and inferior vice. Twitter and social media platforms that we compare to slot machines should be defined as a new form or class called Strange Games, wherein the only winning move is not to play.
  - acidburnNSA 6y ago
    I disagree only because I've had real contacts with personal giants on twitter dozens of times and never won anything at a casino. While I do spend more time on twitter, I believe this effect is more common than your analogy allows. People into fringe academic topics are likely to see this effect more than people @ing along and kanye.

scottmsul 6y ago

The technology should exist by now for a decentralized twitter right? Resorting to email newsletters seems very clunky. Couldn't there be something that uses a bittorrent-like protocol, where the followers support the network for whomever they're following?

riffic 6y ago
The W3C published ActivityPub as a recommendation (this is essentially a web standard) on January 23, 2018.

goldforever 6y ago

Everyone just maintain their own Mastodon servers!

unicornporn 6y ago

https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ ?