10 ms·

Goodbye, Twitter

87 points by annadane 6y ago

marketingPro 6y ago
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.
- nuclearnice1 6y ago
  If you’re willing to share, who are the three? Or 4.
Kye 6y ago
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.
xwdv 6y ago
Did you know some people that write these big dramatic goodbye posts to a social network sometimes never even used that network in the first place? They’re just farming for clicks and clout. It’s easy to get away with because a deleted account is indistinguishable from one that never existed in the first place. Always be skeptical.
- novok 6y ago
  This one has been using twitter seriously for over a decade. You can even see their past history from some tweet archive service if you do some research.
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
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.
- trav4225 6y ago
  Yeah, what is the deal with that, anyway? Twitter is constantly giving me the "something went wrong" message or telling me that I'm being rate-limited even though I only hit the site about 10 times a week.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
    My guess is their bot/scraper detection not liking anything that's not a 100% standard, extension-free browser. Although I've heard that even people without privacy extensions are getting hit by it, so it may just be a super aggressive bot detection that's randomly hitting everyone or some other bug that Twitter doesn't care because it presumably a) doesn't affect logged in users b) non-logged-in users who go there really want/need to see something (e.g. whether the US president is about to deport them) so they will put up with it and reload.
spinach 6y ago
I only really became aware of how bad Twitter's censorship was when I became 'gender critical', as in, I believe in biological reality and don't think that male-bodied people should be in women's prisons, rape shelters, women's sports, with young girls in changing rooms, etc. Then I saw how Twitter (and other social media sites) blocked and banned women (and to a lesser extent, men) from talking about it. It has been an extremely shocking revelation. It is now 'wrongthink' on big sites like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc, to talk about the differences in men and women. Terrifying stuff, when you can't even discuss or debate that.
- Kye 6y ago
  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.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    Doubt it's worse than what we see happening to the likes of JK Rowling. It's cool to be trans on Twitter, and I'm not being flippant. Trans are basically ascendent. e.g. Meghan Murphy's suspension from Twitter after tweeting the widely held view of "Men aren't women". You'd have to give some examples of suspensions in the other direction to help me understand.
- ATsch 6y ago
  This is a great endorsement of Twitter, but unfortunately they are much more tolerant towards hate mobs than this post would imply.
- eranimo 6y ago
  Sorry but Twitter is not legally obligated to be your platform for transphobic hate speech.
- MangoCoffee 6y ago
  regarding Twitter's censorship... the way Twitter take down NY Post is rather interesting. Even if NY Post story on Hunter Biden is false. Twitter allowed every news outlet to peddled Steele dossier and Trump golden shower in Moscow for years without banning. edit: then Twitter restored NY Post account but ask them to delete the original post and repost...that just hilarious.
speakberlin 6y ago
This author's posts are always ridiculously sensationalized and usually lean on a bunch of misrepresentations to try to make everything sound more dramatic. For this one, he took the time to write a hyperbolic 2500-word rant using both high-minded language and profanity to compare the topic to human rights violations and abusive relationships, but couldn't find the time to remove the TWO Twitter accounts linked in their sidebar, or even actually delete those accounts.
- sneak 6y ago
  I just deleted it yesterday, and I'm updating the sidebar now (and also switching from Jekyll to Hugo in the process, which is why it's taking a little while). (I also need to update the index page, and probably some others. Will grep.) As for sensationalized: https://sneak.berlin/20201029/traffic/ https://sneak.berlin/20201029/traffic/ I'm sorry you didn't like it. I wrote about it because it was a big deal for me, having been a daily user of the site for a huge chunk of my adult life on the internet. Twitter was one of those things that started out somewhat hackerly and interesting, welcoming bots and API users and third party clients, and is now a horse of a different color entirely. I thought that warranted a post, because it made me sad to see something really cool and fun become a victim of its own scale and popularity.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    How’s the Jekyll to Hugo switch? I’ve considered it, but haven’t done it yet. Currently just hosting on GitHub pages with their built in Jekyll support, but the mess of dependencies is kind of a hassle and Hugo seems nicer.
    - sneak 6y ago
      There’s a “hugo import jekyll” command, but it doesn’t import my theme, so there’s going to be a fair amount of porting it looks like. It brought all of the posts over, though, so that’s good. Using drone with caching for rubygems got my jekyll builds down to under 2 minutes (I use docker) but I imagine hugo will be under a second once I get it switched over. I’ll probably just commit the binary to the repo. Shoot me an email if you’d like me to share the sources.
sebastien_b 6y ago
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).
- sneak 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, what part of the post suggested to you "right-wing nut"? My email address is in my profile.
  - sebastien_b 6y ago
    Sure. Keep in mind that I started reading this with an open mind, so might help for you to also 'step back' and try to view it from more neutral eyes; if you want to call me a 'left wing nut' after this, no problem for me... You have some good points about how Twitter limits the API, and screws with your timeline and settings. I fully agree with those points. However, you seem to focus a lot on the 'bot' aspect of it. This made me suspicious as to why you would; we know a lot of disinformation campaigns use bots, so it can be a natural conclusion that some have grievances against Twitter for limiting what bots can do... You also mention S.230: "How they expect to retain 47 USC §230 (CDA) protections with this behavior" To me, that sounds like it's a reference to the EARN-IT Act, which is about the right's perceived censorship against them, and wanting to "punish" the likes of Twitter that "do that". Again, sounded suspicious to me. Finally (after which I stopped reading), your example of "search censorship" on Twitter is about some QANON slogan (or something like that, I'm glad so say I don't want to know enough about them) - to me, that sounded even more of a grievance by someone on the right. As you stated earlier in the blog post, "their site, their rules"; I don't see it as a question of censorship - does prohibiting someone to yell 'FIRE!' in a crowded room constitute censorship, or preventing harm? I see it as preventing harm, by limiting the reach of something harmful (Just like France and other countries prohibit the display of Nazi symbols/paraphernalia). Again, that's where I stopped; I don't write this to put you down, just that the way you say it doesn't validate your arguments in my eyes.
rukuu001 6y ago
Twitter (and every other social media platform) is - Always under pressure to increase engagement to improve returns - A marketing and lead generation opportunity for businesses - A place to share useful information - A place to share harmful information - Creates opportunities for harm in the real world (bullying, misinfo from hacked accounts/state leaders using dumb passwords) - A source of support/power for community and political organisations And plenty more. This matches the definition of a wicked problem. The worst part? If you leave, the problem is still there. There's no solution to this problem other than turning all social media off and banning all new social media. (edit for formatting)
vitiral 6y ago
That was entertaining and somewhat informative, for someone who hasn't used social media outside of hacker news for a few years. However, if you are being honest with your feelings I'm concerned at your level of anger. Try to keep in mind: you have very little control over these things, being emotionally attached is therefore not useful. Check out Stoicism or Buddhism for inspiration. Accepting this will likely improve your ability to enact change, as well as improve your own well-being considerably.
annadane 6y ago
Flagged, and multiple downvotes in the comments. Umm... k?
okareaman 6y ago
I wish we would deprecate these "Goodby [Twitter | Facebook | Medium | Etc..] articles because a) the author usually assumes that people need to be educated and b) the authors have some axe to grind specific to them. Myself and people I know use these platforms with eyes wide open and find them useful. If a person doesn't like them, quit and spare us the dramatic exit article.
- JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
  >If a person doesn't like them, quit and spare us the dramatic exit article. Would you have said the same about the Declaration of Independence? Sometimes it is a great step forward in dissent to outline why you find the current regime intolerable and why you are leaving.
  - labster 6y ago
    So tired of all these stamp taxes and microaggressions, I’m quitting England forever and deleting my account.
  - unishark 6y ago
    If twitter starts invading the homes of quitters and executing them as traitors, it would certainly add a degree of risk to these decisions.
  - okareaman 6y ago
    Assuming you're not joking, I feel like most of these I'm quitting articles could have been written by some version of Microsoft Clippy + GPT-3, which can hardly be said of the Declaration of Independence.
    - JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
      King George said about the same thing concerning the Declaration. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/king-speaks-for-first-time-since-independence-declared https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/king-speaks-for-...
root_axis 6y ago
Twitter is not important, you might as well be talking about World of Warcraft; it's an entertainment website, not something anyone needs to use. Just because some famous people post stuff there doesn't mean its important.
- CameronNemo 6y ago
  As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, some organizations only post certain information on twitter.
  - root_axis 6y ago
    That is the choice of those organizations.
    - CameronNemo 6y ago
      Right, but some of that information is necessary for me to receive. Thus it is not my choice whether to use Twitter.
      - root_axis 6y ago
        > but some of that information is necessary for me to receive Like what?
        CameronNemo 6y ago
        Service status/outage updates, official news from government organizations.
        root_axis 6y ago
        If your government is posting information exclusively to twitter, that's the problem that needs fixing, not twitter's legal status as a utility. Additionally, an account isn't needed to view that kind of information on twitter.
egonschiele 6y ago
I'm getting really tired of this argument, and I don't think this post adds anything new to it. Is censorship bad? Yes. Is QAnon bad? Also yes. Is there an easy answer here? No. What we're doing as a society is running a massive experiment to see the results of several bad options. Every time I see an article like this, the author doesn't take into account that there is no easy answer here, and that while censorship is bad, all the options are had.
- jariel 6y ago
  "and that while censorship is bad, all the options are had." The word you are looking for is 'dilemma'. The censorship issues is frankly probably a small thing, in the big picture, it's the general toxicity, the addiction to word-bytes of irrelevance, the odd FOMO factor etc.. There are a few nice things about Twitter, but it's really quite easy to quit.
bachmeier 6y ago
Go ahead and complain about Twitter "censoring" things you post. Twitter's a platform. They have to choose what they want on there. Eventually it gets to "Oh, you saw that on Twitter? That's some garbage site where the users post every crazy, unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that comes along." At that point their platform is worthless. Censorship is no different than any other decision about what business you're in. If their decision makes you emotional, oh well.
- bgorman 6y ago
  If Twitter is actively censoring content, then Twitter is not just a platform, Twitter is a curator. Censorship is very different than any other business decision that you make. Censorship is something that is done in response from government/media pressure. Censorship costs money, but it is a cost of doing business in places like China, and now it seems to be becoming part of the cost of doing business in the United States as well. An additional point that I think many people are not realizing is that Twitter is the defecto medium that journalists and "informed citizens" use to get breaking news in the US. Sure there is a layer of indirection in the censorship, but how is this layer of indirection meaningfully different than the censorship done on the WeChat "platform"?
- jfengel 6y ago
  I wonder if it's possible to avoid that, once it gets going. Twitter already seems like it's in the "garbage site" category, and they won't be able to fix that without throwing away the network effect that they depend on. Anybody can post anything they want on their own sites, or a number of other completely unmoderated sites. People don't go there because their friends are already on Twitter. The conspiracy theorists follow because that's where the target is. They don't want to just post on their own site, or on sites where only other conspiracy theorists will read it. Even if those sites weren't perceived as garbage, people wouldn't go there simply because they don't know anybody. It feels like Twitter and FB have the tiger by the ears and can neither let go nor continue to ride.
  - bachmeier 6y ago
    > I wonder if it's possible to avoid that, once it gets going. Twitter already seems like it's in the "garbage site" category, and they won't be able to fix that without throwing away the network effect that they depend on. I think the real danger to Twitter is driving out the 'good' users because they don't want to be affiliated with the brand. The pandemic had the potential to end Twitter. To their credit, they realized it and did something about it. A secondary concern is that the good users will start to retweet stuff that's borderline because they like what it says. I think we're already seeing that. There seems to be developing an attitude of "Well, it's not exactly correct, but it's probably sort of correct, so...[retweet/reply tweet]."
AnonC 6y ago
I skimmed through the article quickly, and didn’t see any mention of decentralized platforms like Mastadon or Matrix. Instead, there was a recommendation for Signal, which is one more centralized platform that also needs a phone number.
- HomeDeLaPot 6y ago
  There was a link to a Mastodon instances search page: >Spend time finding and deliberately interacting with smaller, community-operated online communities.
hossbeast 6y ago
> Quit Twitter, seriously. I’m not joking. You waited until Nov 2020 to quit Twitter?
kache_ 6y ago
Wait a second, people actually use twitter? Mine is just recruiter bait
NotStalin 6y ago
Errata: - Due to public and political _profit_ Quick hn poll has _anyone_ seen anyone else talk about “Twitter rewrites any URLs”, Facebook, google or Hyperlink auditing? - default feed display: was designed to give you their message - twitter: “it’s what we say is happening” - engagement base timeline - again we only allow those that have passed our filters and tests to show you most content - another “it’s what we say is happening” tweak. - defaults to switch all behaviors: and then planned re-defaults to get 80 of the 20 that switch back each time WHY YOU SHOULD QUIT TWITTER NOV 4 MORE THAN ANYTHING: there’s a mouth breathing ugly person at twitter making these decisions and _they actually think you’re too stupid to realize all these changes gives them editorial control_ They think you’re too stupid, they think they’re done genius that got away with it, that you can’t put 2 and 2 together They’re gloating right now - laughing at you 2 + 2 = 4 break free, don’t give your time to be told someone else’s version of what’s happening, your time is too valuable Lock up political profiteers
ffpip 6y ago
> your original URL is no longer available to readers at all. No. If you hover, it shows the full URL. There are extensions that replace all t.co links with the original ones. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=t.co&cat=all https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=t.co&cat=...
dgeiser13 6y ago
That's interesting the thing that he claims doesn't work "searching for #wwg1wga" works just fine for me.

87 points by annadane 6y ago

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.

nuclearnice1 6y ago
If you’re willing to share, who are the three? Or 4.

Kye 6y ago

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.

xwdv 6y ago

Did you know some people that write these big dramatic goodbye posts to a social network sometimes never even used that network in the first place? They’re just farming for clicks and clout. It’s easy to get away with because a deleted account is indistinguishable from one that never existed in the first place. Always be skeptical.

novok 6y ago
This one has been using twitter seriously for over a decade. You can even see their past history from some tweet archive service if you do some research.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago

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.

trav4225 6y ago
Yeah, what is the deal with that, anyway? Twitter is constantly giving me the "something went wrong" message or telling me that I'm being rate-limited even though I only hit the site about 10 times a week.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  My guess is their bot/scraper detection not liking anything that's not a 100% standard, extension-free browser. Although I've heard that even people without privacy extensions are getting hit by it, so it may just be a super aggressive bot detection that's randomly hitting everyone or some other bug that Twitter doesn't care because it presumably a) doesn't affect logged in users b) non-logged-in users who go there really want/need to see something (e.g. whether the US president is about to deport them) so they will put up with it and reload.

spinach 6y ago

I only really became aware of how bad Twitter's censorship was when I became 'gender critical', as in, I believe in biological reality and don't think that male-bodied people should be in women's prisons, rape shelters, women's sports, with young girls in changing rooms, etc. Then I saw how Twitter (and other social media sites) blocked and banned women (and to a lesser extent, men) from talking about it. It has been an extremely shocking revelation. It is now 'wrongthink' on big sites like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc, to talk about the differences in men and women. Terrifying stuff, when you can't even discuss or debate that.

Kye 6y ago
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.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Doubt it's worse than what we see happening to the likes of JK Rowling. It's cool to be trans on Twitter, and I'm not being flippant. Trans are basically ascendent. e.g. Meghan Murphy's suspension from Twitter after tweeting the widely held view of "Men aren't women". You'd have to give some examples of suspensions in the other direction to help me understand.
ATsch 6y ago
This is a great endorsement of Twitter, but unfortunately they are much more tolerant towards hate mobs than this post would imply.
eranimo 6y ago
Sorry but Twitter is not legally obligated to be your platform for transphobic hate speech.
MangoCoffee 6y ago
regarding Twitter's censorship... the way Twitter take down NY Post is rather interesting. Even if NY Post story on Hunter Biden is false. Twitter allowed every news outlet to peddled Steele dossier and Trump golden shower in Moscow for years without banning. edit: then Twitter restored NY Post account but ask them to delete the original post and repost...that just hilarious.

speakberlin 6y ago

This author's posts are always ridiculously sensationalized and usually lean on a bunch of misrepresentations to try to make everything sound more dramatic. For this one, he took the time to write a hyperbolic 2500-word rant using both high-minded language and profanity to compare the topic to human rights violations and abusive relationships, but couldn't find the time to remove the TWO Twitter accounts linked in their sidebar, or even actually delete those accounts.

sneak 6y ago
I just deleted it yesterday, and I'm updating the sidebar now (and also switching from Jekyll to Hugo in the process, which is why it's taking a little while). (I also need to update the index page, and probably some others. Will grep.) As for sensationalized: https://sneak.berlin/20201029/traffic/ https://sneak.berlin/20201029/traffic/ I'm sorry you didn't like it. I wrote about it because it was a big deal for me, having been a daily user of the site for a huge chunk of my adult life on the internet. Twitter was one of those things that started out somewhat hackerly and interesting, welcoming bots and API users and third party clients, and is now a horse of a different color entirely. I thought that warranted a post, because it made me sad to see something really cool and fun become a victim of its own scale and popularity.
- fossuser 6y ago
  How’s the Jekyll to Hugo switch? I’ve considered it, but haven’t done it yet. Currently just hosting on GitHub pages with their built in Jekyll support, but the mess of dependencies is kind of a hassle and Hugo seems nicer.
  - sneak 6y ago
    There’s a “hugo import jekyll” command, but it doesn’t import my theme, so there’s going to be a fair amount of porting it looks like. It brought all of the posts over, though, so that’s good. Using drone with caching for rubygems got my jekyll builds down to under 2 minutes (I use docker) but I imagine hugo will be under a second once I get it switched over. I’ll probably just commit the binary to the repo. Shoot me an email if you’d like me to share the sources.

sebastien_b 6y ago

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).

sneak 6y ago
Out of curiosity, what part of the post suggested to you "right-wing nut"? My email address is in my profile.
- sebastien_b 6y ago
  Sure. Keep in mind that I started reading this with an open mind, so might help for you to also 'step back' and try to view it from more neutral eyes; if you want to call me a 'left wing nut' after this, no problem for me... You have some good points about how Twitter limits the API, and screws with your timeline and settings. I fully agree with those points. However, you seem to focus a lot on the 'bot' aspect of it. This made me suspicious as to why you would; we know a lot of disinformation campaigns use bots, so it can be a natural conclusion that some have grievances against Twitter for limiting what bots can do... You also mention S.230: "How they expect to retain 47 USC §230 (CDA) protections with this behavior" To me, that sounds like it's a reference to the EARN-IT Act, which is about the right's perceived censorship against them, and wanting to "punish" the likes of Twitter that "do that". Again, sounded suspicious to me. Finally (after which I stopped reading), your example of "search censorship" on Twitter is about some QANON slogan (or something like that, I'm glad so say I don't want to know enough about them) - to me, that sounded even more of a grievance by someone on the right. As you stated earlier in the blog post, "their site, their rules"; I don't see it as a question of censorship - does prohibiting someone to yell 'FIRE!' in a crowded room constitute censorship, or preventing harm? I see it as preventing harm, by limiting the reach of something harmful (Just like France and other countries prohibit the display of Nazi symbols/paraphernalia). Again, that's where I stopped; I don't write this to put you down, just that the way you say it doesn't validate your arguments in my eyes.

rukuu001 6y ago

Twitter (and every other social media platform) is - Always under pressure to increase engagement to improve returns - A marketing and lead generation opportunity for businesses - A place to share useful information - A place to share harmful information - Creates opportunities for harm in the real world (bullying, misinfo from hacked accounts/state leaders using dumb passwords) - A source of support/power for community and political organisations And plenty more. This matches the definition of a wicked problem. The worst part? If you leave, the problem is still there. There's no solution to this problem other than turning all social media off and banning all new social media. (edit for formatting)

vitiral 6y ago

That was entertaining and somewhat informative, for someone who hasn't used social media outside of hacker news for a few years. However, if you are being honest with your feelings I'm concerned at your level of anger. Try to keep in mind: you have very little control over these things, being emotionally attached is therefore not useful. Check out Stoicism or Buddhism for inspiration. Accepting this will likely improve your ability to enact change, as well as improve your own well-being considerably.

annadane 6y ago

Flagged, and multiple downvotes in the comments. Umm... k?

okareaman 6y ago

I wish we would deprecate these "Goodby [Twitter | Facebook | Medium | Etc..] articles because a) the author usually assumes that people need to be educated and b) the authors have some axe to grind specific to them. Myself and people I know use these platforms with eyes wide open and find them useful. If a person doesn't like them, quit and spare us the dramatic exit article.

JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
>If a person doesn't like them, quit and spare us the dramatic exit article. Would you have said the same about the Declaration of Independence? Sometimes it is a great step forward in dissent to outline why you find the current regime intolerable and why you are leaving.
- labster 6y ago
  So tired of all these stamp taxes and microaggressions, I’m quitting England forever and deleting my account.
- unishark 6y ago
  If twitter starts invading the homes of quitters and executing them as traitors, it would certainly add a degree of risk to these decisions.
- okareaman 6y ago
  Assuming you're not joking, I feel like most of these I'm quitting articles could have been written by some version of Microsoft Clippy + GPT-3, which can hardly be said of the Declaration of Independence.
  - JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
    King George said about the same thing concerning the Declaration. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/king-speaks-for-first-time-since-independence-declared https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/king-speaks-for-...

root_axis 6y ago

Twitter is not important, you might as well be talking about World of Warcraft; it's an entertainment website, not something anyone needs to use. Just because some famous people post stuff there doesn't mean its important.

CameronNemo 6y ago
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, some organizations only post certain information on twitter.
- root_axis 6y ago
  That is the choice of those organizations.
  - CameronNemo 6y ago
    Right, but some of that information is necessary for me to receive. Thus it is not my choice whether to use Twitter.
    - root_axis 6y ago
      > but some of that information is necessary for me to receive Like what?
      - CameronNemo 6y ago
        Service status/outage updates, official news from government organizations.
        root_axis 6y ago
        If your government is posting information exclusively to twitter, that's the problem that needs fixing, not twitter's legal status as a utility. Additionally, an account isn't needed to view that kind of information on twitter.

egonschiele 6y ago

I'm getting really tired of this argument, and I don't think this post adds anything new to it. Is censorship bad? Yes. Is QAnon bad? Also yes. Is there an easy answer here? No. What we're doing as a society is running a massive experiment to see the results of several bad options. Every time I see an article like this, the author doesn't take into account that there is no easy answer here, and that while censorship is bad, all the options are had.

jariel 6y ago
"and that while censorship is bad, all the options are had." The word you are looking for is 'dilemma'. The censorship issues is frankly probably a small thing, in the big picture, it's the general toxicity, the addiction to word-bytes of irrelevance, the odd FOMO factor etc.. There are a few nice things about Twitter, but it's really quite easy to quit.

bachmeier 6y ago

Go ahead and complain about Twitter "censoring" things you post. Twitter's a platform. They have to choose what they want on there. Eventually it gets to "Oh, you saw that on Twitter? That's some garbage site where the users post every crazy, unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that comes along." At that point their platform is worthless. Censorship is no different than any other decision about what business you're in. If their decision makes you emotional, oh well.

bgorman 6y ago
If Twitter is actively censoring content, then Twitter is not just a platform, Twitter is a curator. Censorship is very different than any other business decision that you make. Censorship is something that is done in response from government/media pressure. Censorship costs money, but it is a cost of doing business in places like China, and now it seems to be becoming part of the cost of doing business in the United States as well. An additional point that I think many people are not realizing is that Twitter is the defecto medium that journalists and "informed citizens" use to get breaking news in the US. Sure there is a layer of indirection in the censorship, but how is this layer of indirection meaningfully different than the censorship done on the WeChat "platform"?
jfengel 6y ago
I wonder if it's possible to avoid that, once it gets going. Twitter already seems like it's in the "garbage site" category, and they won't be able to fix that without throwing away the network effect that they depend on. Anybody can post anything they want on their own sites, or a number of other completely unmoderated sites. People don't go there because their friends are already on Twitter. The conspiracy theorists follow because that's where the target is. They don't want to just post on their own site, or on sites where only other conspiracy theorists will read it. Even if those sites weren't perceived as garbage, people wouldn't go there simply because they don't know anybody. It feels like Twitter and FB have the tiger by the ears and can neither let go nor continue to ride.
- bachmeier 6y ago
  > I wonder if it's possible to avoid that, once it gets going. Twitter already seems like it's in the "garbage site" category, and they won't be able to fix that without throwing away the network effect that they depend on. I think the real danger to Twitter is driving out the 'good' users because they don't want to be affiliated with the brand. The pandemic had the potential to end Twitter. To their credit, they realized it and did something about it. A secondary concern is that the good users will start to retweet stuff that's borderline because they like what it says. I think we're already seeing that. There seems to be developing an attitude of "Well, it's not exactly correct, but it's probably sort of correct, so...[retweet/reply tweet]."

AnonC 6y ago

I skimmed through the article quickly, and didn’t see any mention of decentralized platforms like Mastadon or Matrix. Instead, there was a recommendation for Signal, which is one more centralized platform that also needs a phone number.

HomeDeLaPot 6y ago
There was a link to a Mastodon instances search page: >Spend time finding and deliberately interacting with smaller, community-operated online communities.

hossbeast 6y ago

> Quit Twitter, seriously. I’m not joking. You waited until Nov 2020 to quit Twitter?

kache_ 6y ago

Wait a second, people actually use twitter? Mine is just recruiter bait

NotStalin 6y ago

Errata: - Due to public and political _profit_ Quick hn poll has _anyone_ seen anyone else talk about “Twitter rewrites any URLs”, Facebook, google or Hyperlink auditing? - default feed display: was designed to give you their message - twitter: “it’s what we say is happening” - engagement base timeline - again we only allow those that have passed our filters and tests to show you most content - another “it’s what we say is happening” tweak. - defaults to switch all behaviors: and then planned re-defaults to get 80 of the 20 that switch back each time WHY YOU SHOULD QUIT TWITTER NOV 4 MORE THAN ANYTHING: there’s a mouth breathing ugly person at twitter making these decisions and _they actually think you’re too stupid to realize all these changes gives them editorial control_ They think you’re too stupid, they think they’re done genius that got away with it, that you can’t put 2 and 2 together They’re gloating right now - laughing at you 2 + 2 = 4 break free, don’t give your time to be told someone else’s version of what’s happening, your time is too valuable Lock up political profiteers

ffpip 6y ago

> your original URL is no longer available to readers at all. No. If you hover, it shows the full URL. There are extensions that replace all t.co links with the original ones. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=t.co&cat=all https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=t.co&cat=...

dgeiser13 6y ago

That's interesting the thing that he claims doesn't work "searching for #wwg1wga" works just fine for me.