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Quitting Twitter

• leesalminen 6y ago
  I quit Twitter about 6 months ago. It was eerily similar to quitting smoking (which I did a couple years ago). Honestly, that scared me straight. The fact that an app on my phone had similar addictive qualities to tobacco was alarming enough to keep me off. I still get the urge to log back in sometimes, but luckily I perma-nuked the account so I’d be starting from scratch, which is a large enough barrier to keep me from trying (for now).
  • tinyhouse 6y ago
    Is Twitter more addictive than say HN?
    • leesalminen 6y ago
      For me, yes. My addiction on Twitter was centered around real-time news/events. HN doesn’t have that focus, so for me, it’s a lot easier to moderate time on HN. I love HN, and probably do spend too much time here, but at least I’m not pulling to refresh sorted by latest tweets for hours on end every time there’s a plane crash (literal or figurative).
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • tinyhouse 6y ago
        I much rather prefer discussion on HN for the simple fact that it's anonymized. That makes it much easier for users to up/down vote comments and it just works better. It shows you what people really think. It also makes everything more equal because it doesn't matter who you are or how many followers you have.
        • chanmad29 6y ago
          much like a well managed subreddit?
          • tinyhouse 6y ago
            Indeed.
    • firebaze 6y ago
      From my perspective, twitter is toxic as hell, focused on out-group shaming, blaming and finally hating. HN is open discourse, focusing on respect. At least to me.
      • picks_at_nits 6y ago
        Beware. One thing that happens to people in a homogeneous community is that the out-group shaming becomes invisible. So everyone in every little community thinks that their community is respectful, but the other communities are about hating. Hacker News aggressively moderates to remove the most abrasive types of shaming, but you can still shame out-groups here, provided you do it civilly. See any thread about managing developers: At least one person will go on a rant about how managers are empty suits who do nothing useful and just get in the way while extracting rents in the form of cushy compensation packages. That kind of generalization is also out-group shaming, it just doesn't look like a bunch of misogynists complaining that there are too many women in tech demanding equity. (I'm in no way saying that just because Twitter has shaming, and so does HN, that the two are equivalent. They aren't even close to equivalent, because these things are not binary. But I am trying to point out how toxicity can be hard to judge from within a community.)
        • firebaze 6y ago
          My wife is a developer in the same company as mine (albeit in a totally different sub-orga). This is maybe the cause I don't share your experience (at all). She's the best paid person in her sub-orga. We're definitely lucky, but also the woman-vs-man topic isn't relevant at all here. We (as a company) are just looking at skill in all aspects, and she's good in most of them, as am I in a different subset. She also has a twin-sister. She works in a different company, different federal state, and she earns a bit more than my wife - and she also doesn't care at all about the shenanigans happening, she's just doing what she likes and is good at. If you don't believe me I'll create an email alias you can mail me at and we'll get into touch. Yes both of them have been humiliated, and this is what we should work against. But they have proven theirselves, and they have had support from co-workers, and instead of always putting blame on whatever, we should put focus on supporting good people, regardless of gender. This is so much lost.
  • nlh 6y ago
    Slight non sequitur here but what you said about addictive qualities reminds me of a similar experience I had with a game a few years ago. I've never been hooked on nicotine or similar, but toward the end of 2017 a game (Simcity Buildit) dug deeeeeeeeep into my soul and for the first time in my life I had to aggressively quit something like that cold turkey. First I should say: It's a great game and really fun! (HA - I know I sound like a pusher...) I didn't spend any money on it. But man did I spend brain cycles and time on it. A few specific game dynamics really get their hooks into you - this concept of mini game-within-a-game "tournaments" which require your attention over a specific period of time (ahem weekends). My "rock bottom" was two things: I was on a long drive from LA to SF and I had my girlfriend open up the app to complete a few time-sensitive tasks for me while I was driving. There I was explaining "ok now swipe this. Drag it there. Great. Now do the same on this other thing. Ok thanks love!". The second was that a common strategy in the game where you start a second instance on a different device to mine certain resources (it was called a "feeder city"). So there I was on any given Friday night sitting on the couch with my iPhone AND iPad open, swiping away. One day it struck me that there was no end to this cycle. There was no winning. There was just more building and more swiping and more hours to go down the drain, and I just realized I had to quit. So I hard-deleted the game from my phone and iPad right in the middle of a weekend mini-tournament and never looked back. In the days following, I had very regular twitches and urges to go back. "Just one more"....I realized this was real addiction. Luckily it passed after a few days. But wow - what an eye-opener for me.
    • adventured 6y ago
      I'm a bit surprised a city builder is highly playable on mobile. I've played Cities Skylines on desktop (and versions of SimCity in the past). I can't imagine trying to build anything of scale on mobile in a city builder though. Is it primarily the mechanics, feedback systems, that are enjoyable, rather than the visual construction aspect?
      • Brendinooo 6y ago
        I got hooked on this in December after getting an iPad. Trying to moderate my usage. It helps to realize that 1) it's supposed to be fun and 2) I'll never be the best. I'd imagine I'll get off it a bit more once the weather warms up. It's really well-made. My biggest knock on it is that it's a typical "milk as much money as possible out of the user" game, so you never know which mechanics are truly random or which ones are set up to hack your psychology. Some of the nags/alerts wear on you. I also wish it was a bit more optimized for aesthetics (no diagonal roads!). But the UX is extremely good. The visuals are nice. The contests and general gameplay goals are engaging and fun. It's 4X-like, with that "one more turn" vibe and the need to balance multiple goals.
  • jazzido 6y ago
    I could've written your same comment. As a (current) smoker, my experience of having quit twitter is exactly the same. I recently blogged about that [1]. It's in spanish, but Google translate does an acceptable job with it. [1] https://blog.jazzido.com/uncategorized/2021/02/12/mejore-su-vida-borre-twitter/ https://blog.jazzido.com/uncategorized/2021/02/12/mejore-su-...
• rriepe 6y ago
  These are all great points. I recently quit too. It was mostly because like this post, I found someone I really respected and it turned out he was a raging bigot against people like me. The site's tagline should be "Meet your heroes!"
• maitredusoi 6y ago
  who cares ?
• mberning 6y ago
  If as many people quit twitter as talk about it, the company would be bankrupt. There are a lot of people “sneaking a smoke” on twitter when the kids are at school.
  • superkuh 6y ago
    Yep. A lot of people "quit" these nasty centralized you-as-a-product services but what they mean by quit is that they don't use their account anymore. They still use the services.
• ourcat 6y ago
  You should create a new blog category, containing only posts with titles up to 280 characters and just post the tidbits you'd otherwise post to Twitter. Styled accordingly. If worthy enough, you could even share the link to any one of them on Twitter. ;)
• cdnsteve 6y ago
  I've also stopped using for a few months and found more time and focus without it.
• ketzo 6y ago
  For a post called "Quitting Twitter", I think this piece actually does a great job summarizing the really cool things about Twitter. I think there's something a little magical about finding someone you really respect in your field, responding to one of their tweets, and getting a thoughtful response six minutes later! The toxicity is rough, though. It exhausts me on big subreddits, too -- it's impossible to have conversations with anyone because the focus is on "dunking" people for the benefit of other readers. Like anything else reddit, it gets better the smaller you go. I find this is actually true on Twitter, too. I've had some positive interactions in the replies under a @patio11 tweet with 120 likes. But any moderately popular tweet is just a shitshow. Twitter (and Reddit, and HN, etc.) are sort of pretending to be conversation-software, when really, they're tiny blogs; by and large, you don't write replies for the benefit of the person to whom you're responding, you write them for all the people who you know are going to see your reply. That's the source of so much of the toxic feeling, IMO, but it's also the entire value propositon: come see the interesting (or funny, or infuriating, or horrifying) back-and-forth of internet strangers! Maybe the toxicity can be eliminated or mitigated somehow, but I really think it's part-and-parcel with the format of "public conversation." God knows I'm part of the problem; I write between 1 and 10 HN/reddit comments every day. It's an addiction! External validation feels very, very good. I try not to "dunk" people, but if there's one thing the internet has, it's no shortage of idiotic comments, and it's hard for me not to take a condescending tone when someone's talking about how women don't deserve to play videogames or how Joe Biden wants to eat babies or whatever. I guess the best you can hope for is a community spirit that encourages thoughtful conversation and discourages shit-talking. And I think that's where Twitter, by and large, really fails. Twitter culture at large is so, so based around "look at this dumb shit this idiot said! aren't they stupid?" It sucks, and it absolutely warps people like the author says.
  • tinyhouse 6y ago
    Toxicity on twitter is huge but once you unfollow toxic users (or any user who tweets nonsense too often) things look much better. Tbh I don't use twitter to engage in conversations. I use it mostly to consume interesting content.
    • 6y ago
• alessandroetc 6y ago
  Agree with a lot of these points, but not quite sure how you solve them with a better solution.
• tanylak 6y ago
  Who needs twitter anyway? Right? We have hacker news :)
  • b3lvedere 6y ago
    It's a huge difference for me though. Most of the items here are quite interesting to me and not all critics are stomped into the ground relentlessly. It looks like there is some strange level of respect. I have written mistakes and apologized for them. It seems most of you accept that. Or maybe it's so heavily moderated i only see the stuff i'm allowed to see. I don't know. I've tried Twitter a few days and decided it's not for me. Same with Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, forums, irc, etc. Some parts of them are quite useful, but for the most they are a very stressful environment to participate in.
• sneak 6y ago
  Even if you have followers, if your individual tweets don't engage well, Twitter won't show them to 100% of the people who explicitly follow you, thanks to their algorithms. YouTube is the same way, which is why you see channels telling users to do three clicks to actually follow: subscribe, notifications on, notifications set to "all". They censor you from your own opt-in audience unless your content is clickbaity enough and benefits the platform's own advertising metrics. You can only ever be a sharecropper on censorship platforms, no matter how successful you become. I had >20k followers after more than a decade on Twitter, and I deleted. Now I use an email mailing list, and 100% of the people who want to see 100% of the things I send. Fuck censorship.
  • sago 6y ago
    > YouTube is the same way I had seen that claim before but I never noticed it. I subscribe to about 250 YouTube channels. They seem to appear in my subscriptions, in chronological order, as they're released. Are you referring to the homepage rather than subscriptions?
    • sneak 6y ago
      Yes. YouTube deserves a little bit of credit for preserving a chronological view, but this is perhaps cancelled out by their draconian restrictions on what you are allowed to publish.
  • picks_at_nits 6y ago
    What you describe in the first paragraph is not censorship. There's a whole thing around censorship not applying to private platforms, but even if you argue that the word "censorship" applies to a private entity moderating the content it publishes with its own money (like Hacker News: It definitely moderates content), the thing you describe is still not that kind of "censorship." Showing or not showing your tweets based on Twitter optimizing for engagement and advertising is not like a government deciding that nobody is allowed to criticize the Dear Leader. It's actually like a grocery store that promises to stock your product for free, but you aren't Coca-Cola, so you get shitty shelf space and positioning, until you either pay up for shelf space, or build enough demand for your product that the store decides it can make more money giving you better positioning. Twitter also moderates content in a way that has nothing to do with engagement and making them money. But if you give someone free content, you have to accept them deciding how they feel like monetizing that content. If you don't like it, write a blog.
• trestenhortz 6y ago
  I quit Facebook the other day. I didn’t like my online persona. I’d rather friends and family knew me in person or not at all.
  • An0mammall 6y ago
    I used facebook for promoting local events but in the last ~5 years it was less and less effective for that. Then I used it only for meme groups and getting angry at strangers. Hard quit last summer and never looked back.
    • rconti 6y ago
      You don't have to join meme groups? They're easier to avoid than a toxic algo. I just use groups for hobbies I actually engage in.
  • minikites 6y ago
    >I didn’t like my online persona. I think this is one of the bigger factors when people choose to quit social networks, even if they don't realize it explicitly. There's such a "hustle culture" to get likes and favorites that it really warps what you can post. You can't really be vulnerable on a social network because it either gets ignored or interpreted as another hustle ("You got this!!!") because the surrounding content from everyone else is "Look at how great I am!". YouTube creators have to explicitly say "Please like and subscribe!" but that's implicit and pervasive on Twitter and Facebook by their very nature.
• An0mammall 6y ago
  I never really used it much, but sometimes there are really interesting threads or content on local events. There also seems to be a massive amount of vile and rude commenters.
• AzzieElbab 6y ago
  I am perfectly fine using Twitter by following carefully via lists only and not following anyone who regularly makes Twitter storms, not following any celebrities, very few journalists, no major publications/tv networks whatsoever
  • AzzieElbab 6y ago
    I know it is more of a disengagement strategy, but with Twitter in it's current state ...
• catillac 6y ago
  All wonderful points. I also stopped using Twitter a few months ago, not for me. I especially like the point about piquing interest on “who the dunkee” is — wow what a waste of time.
• bachmeier 6y ago
  I've used Twitter for more than a decade. I check it maybe once a day, and when I do, I read maybe 10% of my timeline and move on to something more productive. The biggest problem is viral misinformation combined with a focus on people that are "good with Twitter". Someone with a bunch of followers tweets something like "the sun rose in the north this morning" and if you respond "that didn't happen and it couldn't have happened because science" you'll either be ignored, they'll be offended and block you, or they'll start cursing at you and all their tweets will be liked and retweeted. The reason I used Twitter back in the day was to find out what was happening in the world and to interact with others. These days there are too many that think a big follower count means they can tweet stuff that's wrong. Then there's the other stuff where you have to see someone called out for calling women brilliant (yep, happened today). Try as I might, I can't return my timeline to what it was, and I can now go a week without looking at it and I don't miss anything.
  • _qulr 6y ago
    > if you respond "that didn't happen and it couldn't have happened because science" you'll either be ignored, they'll be offended and block you, or they'll start cursing at you Have you considered that the problem might be you, and "Someone is wrong on the internet" repliers are super tedious?
    • bachmeier 6y ago
      Yes, and that's not the problem at all. But I do want to thank you for a perfect demonstration of how misinformation spreads. Folks like you don't even care that the content of a tweet is factually incorrect, and in most cases, it's made up so they can get likes and retweets. The post-truth world is alive and well. And, unfortunately, profitable for some.
      • _qulr 6y ago
        > a perfect demonstration of how misinformation spreads Which misinformation did I spread? > Folks like you don't even care that the content of a tweet is factually incorrect That's quite an interference.
• andrewmutz 6y ago
  > I still want to read what people like Patrick McKenzie, Zach Weinersmith, John Carmack and others have to say. I quit twitter years ago for some of the same reasons mentioned in this blog post, and I 100% agree with this quote. I would love a way to get at the good content from twitter without all the constant rage. Does anyone know a good tool or way to get a much more curated Twitter experience?
  • chrisco255 6y ago
    I just keep a markdown file with links to Twitter profiles from people I care about. Then I visit the links directly despite not having a Twitter profile, I get to read what they have to say. I also added the "Calm Twitter" plugin to my browser that strips out Trending stories, hides like counts, etc. It makes for a better, focused Twitter experience. I don't care about posting, so I get the info I want without needing to participate in the gamification.
    • chc 6y ago
      That seems exactly equivalent to following those people and not posting, but more work. How is this better?
      • randomsearch 6y ago
        Because twitter will constantly try to show you content you don’t want in order to engage/enrage you.
        • chc 6y ago
          Only if you tell it to. You can choose an algorithmic feed or a chronological feed. I don't know why anybody would choose the algorithmic feed, because you're right that it sucks, but there's also no pressure to do so.
          • randomsearch 6y ago
• azornathogron 6y ago
  I've been on Twitter for several years now, but not posted much. I used to find it interesting because there was a lot of good technical articles and information being shared by the people I chose to follow. Then over time that mostly stopped, but it was still good because I followed people who posted the kind of dumb jokes I like. And then I felt increasingly disconnected from everyone because of being stuck at home in a pandemic. And I started tweeting a little more, and getting pretty much nothing back. And then I had a bad interaction (nothing abusive, just confrontational), and I uninstalled the app from my phone. I basically agree with everything in TFA. There is fun, interesting and sometimes even insightful stuff on Twitter. But people become warped. It's incredibly difficult to actually have a two-way communication on Twitter; people will misinterpret and assume the worst about everything you write. And I was not immune to this effect either - I realised when I went back over the back-and-forth that had felt so emotionally charged at the time, that I had also been assuming the worst and replying without the open mind that might have led to a better interaction.
• MrPowers 6y ago
  Twitter is the best place to reach some of the top people in tech (in the big data niche at least). It's a great place to market projects, get a following, and find open source collaborators. It can also be a toxic place that puts you in a bad head space and wastes time. A ticking time bomb that can blow up your productivity at any moment. I recommend aggressively muting / unfollowing to keep your feed clean. Anything offensive / negative deserves an unfollow. Irrelevant stuff deserves a mute. For me, ratio of programming posts / other posts should be 10:1. Also mute people that retweet too much. Having a follower strategy is also important. For me, Twitter is a part time job, similar to open source work. It's not "fun".
  • jonnycomputer 6y ago
    Twitter (and FB) would be 2x better if they just removed the retweet. yeah, sure, it can be gotten around, but misinformation or sensationionalist crap shared so easily, so cheaply, has a lot of unintended consequences.
• waprin 6y ago
  I agree with most of what the author wrote. I also don’t like how I can follow something who has good thoughts on Python but get their thoughts on politics. Then Twitter turned “like” into “maybe retweet” (you see what people you follow liked) so even if they don’t tweet about politics I see the political tweets they liked. I like the focus of subreddits in comparison. I still use Twitter mostly as a write-only thing if I want to drop off a blog post, another place to reach me, and occasionally check my timeline. Lists are also a recommended feature. With that said, I think Twitter has a bright future. Why? Because it’s always been a good way for celebrities to reach people. And in a world of Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, Tiktok etc there are more mini-celebrities than ever and they all use Twitter for any quick thought blurbs. So they’ve really benefited by the expansion of what constitutes a celebrity. My mom also uses Twitter, never tweets, but just follows news outlets. And it’s the only social media she has as a privacy-oriented person which is interesting. Like most social media apps, if you don’t use it compulsively and control how you use it, there’s usually at least some value in having a presence.
• Jerry2 6y ago
  Whenever I think about signing up because I came across some post and want to provide an answer, I remember that funny GIF that I've seen: "Are u ready to get insanely fucking mad" [1] and somehow hold myself back. I think I'll pass ever singing up for it. [1] https://twitter.com/legaladvice_txt/status/1163094381638930432 https://twitter.com/legaladvice_txt/status/11630943816389304...
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• hankchinaski 6y ago
  i quit twitter after years of using it when i got exhausted of having to see political tweets from anyone i was following in tech. i just want to follow certain topics, but unfortunately the mute feature is not enough to filter out all the crap
• liminal 6y ago
  I check Twitter to learn what I should be outraged about. I literally say to myself "I wonder what I should be outraged about today?" and then lo and behold, Twitter tells me. I don't know where else to get that information. I wish I did, since Twitter is very inefficient with too many people retweeting the same tidbit so they can try their hand at a witty rejoinder. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the rejoinders, but they're also exhausting and lower the signal to noise ratio a lot.
  • garmaine 6y ago
    Why do you want to be outraged?
    • ThankYouBernard 6y ago
      Why do you not want to be outraged? Do you have a source to say that being not outraged is better than being outraged?
    • liminal 6y ago
      There's a lot of stuff I want to know about that I don't know where else to find out about it, and much of this is outraging. For example, a lot of my Twitter feed is people pointing out how the Canadian media misrepresents events with a pro-conservative bias. Perhaps ignorance would be bliss, but I opt for a daily dose of poison to keep my tolerance up.
      • rubyist5eva 6y ago
        Have you ever thought that you think your perception of Canadian media is that way because Twitter is full of outraged leftists who think everything right of Marx is "far right propoganda"? Because as a Canadian that stays off of twitter because I find it toxic and not useful, I have to say when you wrote that Canadian media is pro-conservative I kinda laughed out loud a little.
        • liminal 6y ago
• asim 6y ago
  Quitting Twitter is by far the best thing you can do for your mental health.
  • jerrygoyal 6y ago
    you can only speak for yourself.
• tradesmanhelix 6y ago
  I recently "quit" Twitter myself. I say "quit" because if you actually delete/remove/whatever your account, your handle may then become available for others to use. To avoid that, I used a combo of scripts/services to remove all of my Twitter data (tweets, likes, follows, etc.) and scrubbed my bio, profile pics, etc. I also set a reminder to log in every 6 months to avoid being purged and have my handle become available that way. I'm using https://fraidyc.at/ https://fraidyc.at/ in Firefox to follow any Twitter accounts I still care about and it works great, even better than Twitter honestly as all tweets are now chronological and I can segment accounts based on how often I care to view their updates, tag them to organize them, etc. Next, I need to move all my YouTube subscriptions to Fraidycat or similar, but, other than that, I'm done with modern social media (deleted Facebook in 2016). YMMV, but the less I use modern social media the more my quality of life and mental well-being have improved. I say "modern" since social media has really been around since email and it's really only the more recent incarnations that have gotten so toxic. Communities like HN and some sub-Reddits are actually still quite enjoyable.
  • grioghar 6y ago
    Thank you for that. I am going to investigate this further. I didn’t think there was a functioning way of doing this. I’d really like to find something similar for Instagram. I want to consume that without creating an account, but haven’t figure out how.
    • tradesmanhelix 6y ago
      You bet :) And FYI, per its website, Fraidycat says it does support Instagram, although I can't vouch for the experience as it's not a platform I use.
  • kyle-rb 6y ago
    fyi they never actually implemented that "purge inactive accounts" thing. I remember people bringing up the issue of dead people's accounts being deleted/taken over, but idk if that was why they shelved it.
• murat124 6y ago
  The other option would be, which could be applied to anything we do, to be a responsible consumer/user but just like with everything else in life it is hard to do primarily for the reason that most services feed on our attention. The amount of your self you open up to public is the amount you lose from it and the more you put in the more you depend on and are addicted to the feelings that rise from using the service. You liked the feeling of being acknowledged by total strangers? Here, some more tweets for you strangers! You want to argue with me on this trivial subject? I'll prove you wrong! On the flip side, you can still both use Twitter and keep your sanity, but to me, it just isn't worth it. Life is too short to pay attention to every little thing that one comes across to.
• cambalache 6y ago
  Out of all the good reasons to quit Twitter, not having enough likes, and observing the proverbial assholes who share one's nationality must be in the bottom 1%
• asjkaehauisa 6y ago
  I tried to use Twitter for cyber security news. I followed very smart people and i hoped to see their research about new vulnerabilities etc. but what I mostly saw was shitty posts about politics, theirs kids and daily life and rare about my topic of interest
  • dcl 6y ago
    Indeed. I'll often see experts in their fields and otherwise very interesting people retweet and reply to stuff I absolutely don't care about, or have already heard enough of.
• undefined1 6y ago
  quitting Twitter will improve your life, but here's the problem: it leaves it to the most radical. and why is that a problem? because there is a pipeline from Twitter into the real world, especially via journalists and politicians who live on there. what's the answer? I'd love to hear ideas! but I think either we need many, many more reasonable voices on Twitter (an uphill battle, given the platform rewards and optimizes for outrage) or the pipeline needs to be severed or replaced. the latter is probably the way to go, but how?
  • readflaggedcomm 6y ago
    Journalists outsourcing their job to squeeky wheels volunteering outrage is a problem with the journalists' superiors, customers, and sense of duty, not with the channels of communication available to us by technology and law. But instead, we will suffer through algorithmic and legislative harrassment because the user is always the problem, not the corporate marketeers.
  • randomsearch 6y ago
    To begin with: we’re a tech community. Building a better twitter is possible, so build it. Even if you don’t build a winning app, you could demonstrate ideas or designs for alternatives. It could even be mock ups or prototypes. Contribute ideas to making a better world. One approach is to leave twitter to the addicts manipulated into rage and just waiting. Either people will “develop antibodies” to twitter (PG) or it will destroy itself. As others have pointed out, the real world institutions can solve the problem by breaking the connection between ML-induced outrage and their policy decisions. You shouldn’t feel like you have to take that on yourself, but I guess if you liked that idea then you could campaign for it. If you stay on twitter you might improve the average level of discourse, but don’t overestimate your ability to resist the feedback loop that will constantly be trying to find new ways to trick you into engagement (and most of the time, enragement). You’re only human and it’s relentless. It doesn’t seem very sophisticated but even a random search algorithm will work given enough tries. You’ll also be legitimising twitter, which is questionable because they are knowingly creating this problem (disclaimer: I’m on twitter). Regulation of social networks is on the way, twitter probably peaked with Trump, and I think you also have to think about opportunity cost, eg arguing on twitter vs building something that improves the world.
• hvocode 6y ago
  Muted words is the only thing that makes Twitter useful for me. Totally takes the temperature down by just excluding things that aren’t useful to see. I mute everything from specific words that I know are going to spark useless arguments to phrases/emojis that show up in intentionally provocative tweets (eg, “that’s the tweet” or the clap emoji).
• mellosouls 6y ago
  I won’t miss people dunking on each other while also not mentioning the dunkee, piquing my curiosity to the point where I investigate who the dunkee was and why. A waste of time Next sentence: Some guy with 14k followers said something. [proceeds to "dunk" on dunkee not mentioned]
• PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  My approach to Twitter has been to aggressively unfollow anyone posting content that I don’t want to be consuming. That ranges from constantly dunking on every opportunity to people who simply tweet too many times per day. The best content and discussion comes from small groups of people with similar interests who aren’t using Twitter simply to fill time or to build their personal brand. Removing everyone else doesn’t take as much work as I expected, as long as you’re not hesitant to unfollow (or even block) those who distract from your desired timeline. The mute function is also highly useful. I often add trending topics like GameStop or Bitcoin or Tesla to my mute list simply because I don’t need to hear everyone’s take or dunk on a popular topic. Finally, taking breaks is important. If you can’t resist checking Twitter 5, 10, or 50 times per day then maybe it’s better being removed from your routine altogether. With a curated follow list, I don’t feel like I miss much by checking every other day or not looking on weekends.
  • smithmayowa 6y ago
    Paul Graham tweets agressively, but I doubt you will block him though, not everyone who tweets agressively is toxic.
    • sevilo 6y ago
      and you just perfectly highlighted the toxicity of twitter in that sentence. Just because someone is popular doesn't mean everyone should like/listen to them if they do not find the person's content aligns with them.
    • thereare5lights 6y ago
      I did. I wouldn't unblock. > not everyone who tweets agressively is toxic. This doesn't matter. It's about controlling what kind of energy you let into your life. Negative energy needs to go.
      • HenryBemis 6y ago
        Time and attention. In my mind/book it's where you give your time and attention. I really enjoy a couple of radio shows, where I need to download the mp3 from their websites (they host/share a coupld of hours after their shows), and SecurityNow podcast. The good thing about it, is that I only listen when I want to listen, and IF I want to listen. Social media, slow and steady, absorb you into giving, increasingly, more time to them. Either by creating an echo chamber, or creating passions, promoting things you love/hate. Anything to get you hooked more. Majority of the people do not filter/reduce the alerts on their phones. Good luck working on a project when you get 10 beeps per hour from Twitter, CNN, BBC, FB, IG, YT. Time and Attention.
• sevilo 6y ago
  Gosh, I particularly resonate with point #2 although all of them are good points. It seems people on twitter are all constantly angry about something, and it's a platform for the squeakiest wheels to find most success regardless of the quality of their content. I never understand why so many people in the tech field are fond of it, it's nearly impossible to have any meaningful conversions or real connections.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• ALittleLight 6y ago
  I like Twitter and use it a lot. I do experience the author's "problem one" though. I don't want to connect anyone I know in real life to my Twitter account so I just started tweeting with zero followers, and the results have not been great. I've gained ~30 from a year or two of infrequent tweets and those 30 never interact with me so they may all be bots. In my experience getting followers is different than getting upvotes on reddit or hackernews. I think it's relatively rare for someone to see a single tweet which they think is so clever or informative that they must follow the tweeter, whereas it's common to upvotes (or like/favorite) such a comment. The author's examples of accounts he follows "Patrick McKenzie, Zach Weinersmith, John Carmack" aren't famous for their tweets, but for blogging/start up advice, comics, and video games. In other words, if you're a notable famous person you can probably build a following on Twitter more or less as a product of your existing accomplishments.
• paulhallett 6y ago
  I quit about six months ago. The majority of people I followed, I felt obligated to follow, in order to keep ahead of social issues. But the toll of "doom scrolling" constant negative/angry/depressed posts really hammered my own mental health. I also developed a habit of refreshing the feed on my phone every five minutes. I quit, and I found myself lost when I picked up my phone, like a lingering habit (I see someone mentioned it being similar to quitting smoking). On reflection, I think the reason I felt an obligation to keep up with social issues etc, was because I was using my real name (ironic that this HN account is also my real name!). I felt like I had to show I was caring and keeping track of it. I do wonder, if I create an account without my real name, I can just use it how I like, and maybe it will be a different experience.
  • _qulr 6y ago
    > I felt like I had to show I was caring and keeping track of it. I don't think this is necessary. A lot of people tweet about purely "professional" subjects and never tweet about social issues. If you stick to that, your followers will know what (and what not) to expect.
  • konjin 6y ago
    The best advice my father gave me about the internet: assume everyone is a rapist who will stalk you and put you in a van if you say anything that can be traced back to you. Ironically enough I use uber under my real name and I'm fine, but everyone I know how uses their real name in social media has had problems.
• mkl95 6y ago
  I have been on Twitter for 10+ years. It was exciting the first few years, but I honestly don't know why I haven't deleted my account yet. I have tried to "reboot" my Twitter account several times during this decade, but my timeline eventually gets full of random political diatribes, passive aggressive tweets, and cliquey inside jokes. It's as if Twitter's algorithms were designed to amplify toxic content and hide thoughtful, assertive stuff.
• nercury 6y ago
  Twitter has a useful feature: unfollow. Just follow what you want to read, and curate the content this way. The other issue, getting more followers, is all about posting something worth following.
• mariodiana 6y ago
  The world would be a much better place if Twitter were used only by mouth-breathing weirdos battling one another in full-on flame wars over which is better: vi or emacs. I'm not joking. I think the pathology that exists on Twitter has always been with us. But, years ago, there was only a "select" group of individuals who had their pathology amplified by Internet forums. Now, people who have no idea what a flame war even is — much less vi or emacs — go to war day after day. And there are millions of them, from every walk of life. So, we've demonstrated flame wars are scalable. Hooray.
• m3kw9 6y ago
  There are many ways to use Twitter, the me of them isn’t to try to build followers, but to build a good follow list to learn from the best
• tester756 6y ago
  it's insane how slowly people realize that social medias are trash I'd say that only small communities are worth something, especially forums. only forum's format is good for discussion unlike fb groups or reddit/hn's format
• jnymck 6y ago
  I too deleted my Twitter account. And because I too also want the upside of reading what interesting people there are saying, what I now do is simply save their profiles in a browser bookmark folder. Every morning I open each profile in a new tab and skim what they’ve shared since I last visited. The added benefit is that this friction has forced me to keep the list small, thus optimizing the signal-to-noise ratio.
• darkhelmet 6y ago
  A slightly less drastic option than quitting is to go into a passive, readonly mode and keep a safe distance. I use https://fraidyc.at/ https://fraidyc.at/ Seriously, it's a thing. You can still follow public social media streams that you're interested in. It does RSS, Twitter, as well as the usual social media suspects. It's fast and perfect for avoiding getting suckered into a fight over nothing important. If you really have to, you can fire up the real thing but this is a good way to get some of your time back.
• nom 6y ago
  Twitter seems to have some unique properties, especially for users that don't have many followers. It feels like you have friends even if you don't know them at all. On other platforms it's way more one-sided, more passive. Something about the way twitter works makes you think you belong to the groups you share interests with - but most of the time it's just a false feeling. I know several people that are glued to twitter, 50k+ tweets and more (for some reason they have mostly niche interests) thinking they belong and have friends, not realizing how toxic it actually is for their mental health. Something about twitters formula works very well for certain kinds of personalities, but what is it?
• bandwitch 6y ago
  I personally do not care about Problem 1. I mostly use Twitter in a passive way -- following people that are experts on the topics that I'm interested in. I assume if you want to get a reasonable following you need to put quite the effort in it. Problem 2 appears but I've noticed that muting works well enough to avoid it. Problem 3 does not seem to be Twitter-specific but again blocking and muting seems to work for me as well. My personal take is that something brings value to you or not depending on how you use it. Here is a quote from (https://perell.com/note/the-paradox-of-abundance/ https://perell.com/note/the-paradox-of-abundance/) that resonates with me: "The Explore Tab on Twitter is the most important newspaper in the world. It’s littered with celebrity gossip and exaggerated political drama — both of which yield a wide reach but incentivize empty content. And yet, as the Paradox of Abundance predicts, Twitter is also one of the world’s top intellectual communities. It’s the bedrock of my social and intellectual life. It’s a place to make friends, raise your ambitions, and connect directly with people at the top of their fields. And yet, most people use Twitter to consume information with no nutritional value."
• brianjunyinchan 6y ago
  We might solve some of these problems with a 3rd party reader that uses Twitter APIs but with a differently structured feed (focus on X people, ignore Y term, etc). Anybody else?
• andrew_ 6y ago
  90% of Twitter: "Someone I don't like did something I don't like and I'm so angry and you need to know about my anger because that will make a big difference to absolutely no one." I've kept my profile/account up, but I've stopped participating and nuked all but a handful of tweets that I thought may be a reference for folks, and didn't want to turn them into dead ends. It's too hard (or requires too much effort) to avoid the toxic stuff that makes Twitter a hellscape. I'd like to go back to the days when people didn't think everyone else was interested in them airing their bullshit to the world.
• benibela 6y ago
  I had an account, but never used it. But recently I noticed, it is really important to tell people about your projects. No one else you get that much visibility. Thus, I have now started using it more However, I have barely any followers, so I am not getting any visibility
• phailhaus 6y ago
  These problems with Twitter don't just "happen". Twitter, like other social media companies, have unparalleled access to some of the best talent out there. Then they target that talent at maximizing comically reductive metrics like "engagement" and call it a day. Twitter's design is extremely naive, that design leads to rampant toxicity and misinformation, and then they surprised_pikachu.jpg. For example: no matter how you interact with a post, you will boost it. So if you say something horribly toxic that incites outrage and reactions, Twitters dumb blind algorithm goes "NICE! Engagement!" and goes off to show that tweet to more people. Facebook does the same thing; every news article posted on Facebook has the most toxic comments right at the top. These sites have designs that are not expressive enough, but they think they can get away with throwing ML algorithms at them; it does not work, and we end up with toxic cesspools.
  • im3w1l 6y ago
    As a former user of the Fediverse, I disagree. Every problem he describes are present there too. It goes deeper than the algorithms: it's because of the fundamental design choices. Default visibility: public. Follow instead of friend. Mentions, hashtags, quote tweets, retweets, likes. But these features are also why it's so popular with celebrities, which is Twitter's unique selling point, so it's not like they can just change it up either.
    • phailhaus 6y ago
      A thousand times yes, this is exactly what I am talking about! I don't mean just ML algorithms, I mean everything.
• withinrafael 6y ago
  Anecdata: I have the blue check, 15.5K followers, and follow exactly 0 people. I found it quite refreshing to use Lists to manage collections of people, not unlike what you would do with an RSS reader. That doesn't stop the inbound (or outbound!) barbs, complaining, and other garbage though. I've experimented with special tweets with replies disabled, deleting often, and leaving Twitter altogether. The last option of course is best for mental health but really impacted my ability to keep up with important developments in the Windows community. (I explored going private, but that'd require I get 15k people to unfollow me as they are automatically grandfathered in. Or perform the block-unblock everyone trick via API. Gee thanks Twitter.)
• acd 6y ago
  Considering quitting all social media. Twitter - Quit, Facebook - Quit, Whatsapp - Quit, Reddit - quit, LinkedIn - Under consideration. Freetime++ Focus++ Adtracking--
  • edmundhuber 6y ago
    I quit everything but Reddit (which I pretty much only lurk in, and only do hobby talk) and LinkedIn (until I strike it rich, I still gotta have a job). It's been excellent since I no longer waste my time being angry about things I can't change, or seeking attention or approval. Obviously some people can cope with the demands of social media more than others, but it didn't work for me, and I think, like me, a lot of people are putting themselves through unnecessary pain to stick to a platform which actually brings little or no value to themselves. In short, fuck social media.
    • acd 6y ago
      I think its an attention economy where companies try to get you hooked by slot machine rewards getting social approval from like buttons.
• rcgorton 6y ago
  If you live the twitter life, you ARE A TWIT
• HgW33WiY6m3W4H9 6y ago
  I joined Twitter in the spring of 2009 and immediately began grooming a set of programmers to follow. These were, in equal measure, interesting people I’ve worked with, famous open source developers, and random interesting folks who tweeted about programming. I really loved it. As a recluse who has no friends IRL, I found Twitter to be my one respite from extreme social isolation. It all changed when Trump announced his candidacy for president. As a staunchly apolitical person, I found it painful to watch my corner of Twitter lose its mind. Formerly engaging and technically curious folks reverted to feverishly decrying each new political development and news story. Outrage became a badge of honor among techies. I did what I’ve always done before: fell back on curation as a means of keeping order. At first I shunted specific individuals into a separate Twitter list. This worked for a while until it turned out that each visit to the “special” list caused me aggravation and disgust. After a few more attempts at re-shuffling my follows, I gave up and unfollowed everyone, renamed my account, and deleted the mobile app. That was in late 2015. I haven’t looked back since then, although in the early weeks of my Twitter abstinence I found it difficult to keep away. But I persevered and never came back. I believe I’m better off. I still have no IRL friends, and there isn’t a social platform on which I’m active. This may not be ideal, but it’s better than watching supposedly intelligent people descend into madness. I won’t have any part of that.
  • cryptica 6y ago
    You shouldn't discount people as 'descending into madness'. There is a genuine reason why they feel the way they do. We are at a critical point in world history whereby the global monetary system is deteriorating and the monetary policies which are currently in place are making life extremely easy for some people and extremely difficult for others. This bifurcation of society is an expected result of that. If you don't feel that there are any problems in society, then you're probably on the 'easy side' because believe me, it's unmistakable when you find yourself on the 'hard side'; things change very quickly. It kind of feels like big companies are using big data to shape people's online experience in radical ways. I literally went from getting tons of upvotes everywhere I posted to getting only downvotes. The content I produce is pretty much the same as it always was but it feels like the online algorithms must have put me in the 'contrarian' bucket and started manipulating my online experience in a negative way. Also it's frustrating career-wise because I became much better as a developer over time but I'm getting less attention than I ever did. It also became impossible to get any funding nowadays; you literally feel like a social pariah even though you never did anything wrong.
• EasyTiger_ 6y ago
  Twitter was useful for following people in the tech field but otherwise I do not miss it. The constant 'gotcha' tweets and blue-checkmark posturing... ughhh, so awful.
• dionidium 6y ago
  Twitter has anti-social behavior built into the UI. Everybody understands why it would be rude if I were talking to you at a party and mid-sentence I turned my head to somebody else and said, "can you believe what this idiot is saying to me?" Well, that's a quote tweet. And, crucially, while it feels nearly as bad when this happens to you on twitter as when it happens in real life [0], it doesn't feel as bad to the perpetrator as it does in real life. It's baked right into the UI. [0] In fact, it actually feels worse, often, because if an account with a lot of followers does this to you, then the website will be unusable for you for at least a day, as hordes of people fill up your mentions with vitriol.
• shruubi 6y ago
  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.
• zug_zug 6y ago
  Very empathetic and solid writing. Here's my generalized experience https://blog.alexrohde.com/archives/703 https://blog.alexrohde.com/archives/703
• cutenewt 6y ago
  > I think Tiktok gets it right here. No matter who the creator is, if the content is good enough it will get hundreds of thousands of views. That system feels fairer to than Twitter. How hard would it be to create a TikTok version of Twitter? (that is, a Twitter feed that generated without following anyone)? Is this simply a matter of nobody having tried this? Or are the signals for text posts insufficient (vs. short form videos)?
  • dcl 6y ago
    Neat idea. A real good test of NLP to identify similar posts/tweet and posters. Signals could be generating by swiping left or right based on interest of the post, or clicking on a star or heart to indicate 'super interest'. Will no doubt end up in situations where people are complaining about _other peoples_ filter bubbles though.
• NautilusWave 6y ago
  App idea: Qwitter, for Twitter rehab.
• chad_strategic 6y ago
  I dumped facebook in 2012. I quit twitter in 2017. Stopped going to new websites and listening NPR in Fall of 2020. Where is my prize? Oh wait, mental health wins the day.
  • core-questions 6y ago
    This is my approach, though I stuck around a lot longer than you did. There's something about the format that makes debates into arguments and makes arguments into shit-slinging. People froth at the mouth on there who would be much more civil in other forums. It's a bit too rapid fire, a bit too unhinged. Narrow columns have something to do with it, I think....
• dgudkov 6y ago
  Twitter could've been so much better if people could post into different channels instead of dumping everything into one feed. Humans are multi-faceted beings and their communication is multi-faceted too. Not supporting it in communication software is just poor abstraction. I want to be able to choose which facet of a person I'm interested in, and which not. Instead, Twitter proposes the "all or nothing" approach. Either you follow everything, or nothing. No wonder we have strong social polarization and social bubbles.
  • dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Twitter could've been so much better if people could post into different channels instead of dumping everything into one feed. Twitter has posting tools for that which could be better, but they exist, are simple, and are widely used) with hashtags and mentions. What it doesn't do is surface a UI that makes it convenient to set up a list of such channels to view and to set one as your default channel instead of the basic feed. That is, as I understand, a common tool of third-party clients, though.
  • rconti 6y ago
    Completely agree. One feed, driven by "engagement" (read: outrage). I tried to follow experts in a field, but the content was 90% about things NOT in their field that I don't care about. The algorithm drives toxicity in a way that is ALSO true about (say) Facebook news article comments; however, my usage of Facebook is not to consume THAT content, but to consume the ACTUAL content of my ACTUAL friends. I'm not "important" enough on Twitter to get any engagement, which I don't really care about, because I'm not trying to be a personality or an influencer, or overuse hashtags for attention and clicks. But then on those rare occasions when you WOULD get value from a large circle, you don't have it. Facebook's drive to require "real names" some years ago, for what it's worth today, has also made it more "familiar. And I'm seeing my friends' content, and, at worse, their off-color or vaguely toxic friends. Some of that stuff sucks to see, but it's far better than the algo-driven firehouse of content from random people I get on Twitter. And on Twitter and IG, the people who I DO know that I follow, are generally a subset of IRL friends, and I'll probably see their content on FB. And anyway, half of them are using generic made-up monikers that change each week and I can't keep track of, or don't care to.
• doggodaddo78 6y ago
  Social media is anything but. I nuked mine because the signal was low and the positive/negative ratio wasn't good. Online participation needs changes to be more worthwhile: 1. Micropayments to participate. 2. Names, verified identities, and pictures. 37signals did a whole article about how people treated each other when there was too much anonymity. 3. Elimination of karma and other gamification. Promotion based on anonymous interest of others. 4. Automatic recognition of insults, crybullying, hate speech, dog whistles, and personal attacks. 5. 7 random people moderation. 6. Less deplatforming, more civil debating.
• ChipSkylark 6y ago
  Try scaling back all forms of social media + notification-based apps and start re-adding them incrementally, one variable at a time, and track how you feel and think in response to each new addition. It takes a while but opens your eyes to the egregious behavior modification taking place on these platforms at scale. I'm at a point in my life where I only care about major, materially-significant news events that could impact my health/safety and the safety of people I care about. I treat all other content as ignorable, nice-to-have at best.
• lanevorockz 6y ago
  Twitter is a terrible platform managed very poorly. It's my sincere opinion is that Twitter Hate is what is breaking down modern society.
  • agentdrtran 6y ago
    Only a tiny fraction of society is on twitter at all.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• dr-detroit 6y ago
  I could never force myself to read Twitter its more dumbed down than newspeak in Orwell's 1984
• allenu 6y ago
  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.
• rayxi271828 6y ago
  For the first few days of unfollowing everyone and putting them into my private lists, I'd wondered why the use of lists wasn't much more widespread. After about a week, I realized something else: with lists only, Twitter is a lot less addictive. The contents are still interesting and useful, but the rage-building contents ("That's outrageous! I have to find out more!") that I'd get from the "normal" Twitter flow are gone. I ended up checking Twitter multiple times a day to once every few days. I think I'm better off now, but I can't help but feel something is missing--and I do realize it's probably withdrawal symptoms. I understand why lists aren't more widespread: it's way worse at feeding your outrage addiction.
• AndrewKemendo 6y ago
  I'm always confused how certain people, who I just wouldn't expect, get these followings in the 10s of thousands of followers. The most recent head-scratcher was a SDE who has less than a year experience and nothing particularly interesting to offer the community (that I could tell) but has 16k followers and pretty high engagement (lots of comments, retweets etc...). I'd love to know how people think about this.
• euske 6y ago
  This article reminds me of another article on HN a few days back about "kids bullying is about climbing up their social hierarchy" or something. I think the same thing can be said to Twitter; for many (including this OP), it's about climbing up whatever social positioning that the Twitter space provides. I don't really understand that kind of use of Twitter. For me, it is always a personal echo chamber that I hang out with a couple of like-minded people. I've never followed "famous" people, and I tweet in the same way as I post on HN... it's mostly just a monologue or "note to self" that is aimed at pretty much no one but myself. Naturally I don't have any addiction problem with Twitter or HN.
• Kees_Veel 6y ago
  I was mass-blocking flat-earthers, magas and other Russian bots until I got suspended for 'automated behavior'. After several suspensions I gave up the account, never looked back and found a new hobby blocking twitter on every website. It's rather odd that Twitter still exists without my participation.
• bilekas 6y ago
  The best way to break from Twitter, is to get banned.. You'll spend a few days asking why, they give valid answers.. You still check it.. But then once you cant give supposed meaningful feedback.. You don't care. What you write in twitter only matters to your legacy. It's a semi protocol now after all.
• garrickvanburen 6y ago
  Twitter is totally optional. I’ve quit multiple times, for years at a time. Returning is always completely jarring - like learning a language that’s 100% slang. Nobody cares if you’re not there and you’re not going to be quizzed about it later. The first time I quit, it was a year before even 1 of my followers even reached out to say, “hey haven’t seen you on Twitter in a while, let’s grab a beer”.
• nishparadox 6y ago
  This post resonated me so well... It's been more than a year since I quit Twitter and the likes. I can't stress enough how good it feels to not have constant stream of mental hazard. I decided to rely on my whim to collect information using my own filter bubble (something I like to term as "information mindfulness"). I feel: as digital platforms are growing and evolving, with everyone inside the echo chambers [0], it's better to practice this "information mindfulness". I am sure it depends on your own usecase for social media like Twitter; how you're going to sink in the platform. For me it didn't work. I hit my mental limit (finally after a long time). [0] - At this stage, almost everything feels like an echo chamber.
• jarbus 6y ago
  If you want to follow a few specific accounts, just try following their RSS feeds! You get to see what they say without all the other junk.
• rufus_foreman 6y ago
  I've never used Twitter in my life. Sounds like all the bullshit from high school that I ditched.
• shitgoose 6y ago
  "When I use reddit or Hacker News, I find that it’s trivial to get thousands of karma and a handful of awards" You have to be kidding! It takes me months to earn a few points that I flush down the toilet the next day with some insensitive comment.
• tamaharbor 6y ago
  Twitter banned me. Apparently, you cannot call Maxine Waters a 'stupid old hag'.
• TeeMassive 6y ago
  I never was on Twitter. At first it felt like people sending limited length paget phone message, often insignificant, and the links I could find on Digg / Reddit (at the time). Then each time I hard about twitter was about scandals and other negative stuff. People saying the wrong thing, getting cancelled, losing their jobs, etc. Why go there? What's the point? If you're there for your business most likely the people following you already knew you or you are in some kind of scandal about to be cancelled.
• jonnycomputer 6y ago
  Wow. Dead on, in almost every respect.
• dcl 6y ago
  I've found the algo generated list of tweets that I'm presented with in the app to be pretty poor these days. More and more often I am having to manually go to specific users to find their tweets because they are not being uplifted by the algorithms.
• donaldtheduck 6y ago
  After the great purge of conservatives Twatter became irrelevant crapware. Only noobs and sheeps (blue pilled people) use it. Wake up people!
• frankydp 6y ago
  Twitter is a troll farm were the trolls don't know they are on a farm. If you think you are just on there to get news then you have already been duped. "News" is the pretty wrapper on the candy bar full of razors. No good comes from crowd rage on tap.
• dudeinjapan 6y ago
  The best way to quit is to have never started.
• kodah 6y ago
  > How does a reasonable, good person end up warped like this, where they assume that every person out there is a bad faith actor? Where there’s absolutely no scope for disagreement? My theory is that Twitter warps people in this way, by simply removing any scope for reasoned discussion. When you only meet trolls, and never have any friendly discussion with different viewpoints, you assume that a person disagreeing with you is a troll. Also, nothing sells like negativity and sadness. It's highly engaging material. In my opinion they're just selling the same old goods. The only difference is that the cost of goods is now you.
• brailsafe 6y ago
  Pro tip for anyone considering doing this but for some reason haven't pulled the trigger: use the "t" cli to backup all your seemingly important stuff, then unfollow everyone and/or deactivate your account. It's like putting your old crap in a sealed bag and dumping it in a storage locker. If it occurs to you to go through the effort of opening it, then go for it. Otherwise nature takes its course. fwiw, Twitter actually has an awesome offline archive of your data available, so you can download that before deactivating your account and have a perfect replica of the interface to browse through it all.
• idownvoted 6y ago
  Twitter is the mother of all rabbit holes. Even the best threads don’t justify opening this portal to hell just to feel used, abused and filthy after 5 min using it. No matter what the topic, it turns peer groups into toxic waste.
• dustymcp 6y ago
  Ive quit all of them a few years ago now i spend my extra time doing woodwork that is soo much more pleasent than collecting internet points and discussing with strangers..
• cryptica 6y ago
  I can relate to the point about feeling 'unheard' on Twitter. It feels like the hierarchy of publishers and subscribers has already been established and there's nothing that can be done to change it. IMO, the real purpose of Twitter today is to maintain the socio-economic order; obviously, Twitter Inc has opted to achieve that by tweaking their algorithms to pin down and lock-in the broadcast/consume hierarchy to reduce popularity churn as much as possible.
• usrme 6y ago
  People might be interested in a project Linus Lee (https://thesephist.com/ https://thesephist.com/) started to create a more personal adaption of using Twitter: https://thesephist.com/posts/lucerne/ https://thesephist.com/posts/lucerne/ It seems to tackle the main concerns people have and really focus on the aspect of reaching hard to find niches.
  • yosito 6y ago
    Beautiful UI! Interesting that you've named your programming language Ink. My first thought on seeing the UI was that this would be perfect for my e ink tablet.
• petercooper 6y ago
  Twitter is fantastic in many ways, but a double edged sword is how rapidly things (including bad faith takes) spread. You can misinterpret even someone you generally agree with, fire off an angry reply, tag in high profile accounts, and end up with a total mess in minutes. Other social media can be used in a similar way but the power of the @mention makes the "R value" particularly high on Twitter. If you say something in a podcast, a YouTube video, on a mailing list, or even in a HN comment, it's more likely to pass on by, even if it's something genuinely contemptible, than an innocuous but misinterpretable tweet.
• orbifold 6y ago
  When I joined twitter a few month ago to promote my scientific publications + open source software projects, I set myself a number of clear rules: 1. Don't engage with or comment on political / social issues. 2. Don't install the app, set a time limit on twitter for all devices. 3. Follow other scientists with few exceptions. 4. Flag posts as irrelevant to me that express anger or controversial political opinions (I especially don't need to know anyones take on the Corona situation). So far it has worked pretty well, I've got invited to give talks based on initial visibility I generated on Twitter. The open source software project I'm working on came to the attention / got engagement / retweets from relevant people. I reconnected with people that I met a few years ago and it even generated a few leads for job opportunities. It is also really useful to keep track of scientific progress in a field and seminars / workshops I might want to attend. The algorithm basically works against you though, even if you follow a few people that post / retweet a lot, they can come to dominate your newsfeed. I also came very close to engage with social / political content, simply because popular content that gets shown to you is often the most controversial. I ended up banning a few mainstream politicians, whose tweets kept getting retweeted by people I wanted to follow and that has solved the problem for the most part. Overall so far twitter seems to create more opportunities than issues for me, but I notice that I spend way more time there than I initially planned.
• konjin 6y ago
  I mean I'd say that even talking about 6th January is a sign of being in the twitter bubble. On there it was an attack worse than 9/11. In the real world it was a bunch of memable pictures that no one cares about 2 months later. I do wonder what happened to podium guy.
• airpoint 6y ago
  If Twitter was a pub, it’d be the odd one where everyone gets pissed way too early, aggressive way too easily and at the of the day smash all the furniture for no good reason. Never understood why would anyone want to hang out or even work there…