have you quit twitter yet?

xp
oh gawd academic twitter is kind of the pits, though I get feeling that pressure

Twitter is the best social media platform. Instagram is too much of a walled garden (you can't even post links!), Facebook is literally useless, but Twitter allows me to have enjoyable conversations with people (including many ILXors) and weed out all the bullshit I don't want to see with minimal effort. And I post links there to everything I publish, promote my book, etc., etc. Twitter is great.

I will never log off.

respect

Twitter is my preferred avenue for receiving promotion from musicians, movie-makers, comic book creators, etc, as well as some small-to-mid-sized scientific accounts, and then just like random "here's a cute picture of a possum!" type stuff. I don't see a lot of negativity in my feed. When I do, I unfollow. I don't see any point in quitting.

i will continue to enjoy Twitter until some dork asks me to pay for it or give them my real name and address or something

I used to bloody love Twitter and met some irl great people whom I still speak to and see. Now, the only tweets I see are on this site; when I do follow a link I always have the same sense of 'fucking hell, thank God I don't spend time here'. It utterly saps me of energy.

So mostly 'no, but I'm thinking about it' I suppose.

why I logged out: I have a (perfectly rational) seething hatred of elon plus I was overdue for a break anyway.

There was something going around (on twitter lol) about returning to Tumblr, which I would honestly consider as that was my best soc med experience but would probably feel very strange

HOOS is back? Maybe I'll start posting here more again

Wait, are we not supposed to use products run by companies owned by assholes now?

Obviously Twitter sucks in many ways. But given that I have nostalgia for the text-based internet and don't want to post images or video along with words, it's really the only social media option. And I've made a lot of musical connections there that resulted in real projects. Would love an alternative that didn't somehow turn to garbage, though.

xp with my primary online timewaster no longer palatable to me i've gotta waste my time SOMEwhere you know

Instagram is too much of a walled garden (you can't even post links!)

wow an occasion to think fondly of instagram, doesn't happen too often anymore

Wait, are we not supposed to use products run by companies owned by assholes now?

you can do whatever you want?

reading the responses, I do wish I'd made this a survey on which social media platforms people still use in 2022 as that's a more interesting q, though it would also be a pain to make all the poll options

Where is "I'm already banned"?

oh dang I didn't think about that! I think you can vote "I am Elon Musk"

the only social media i use is tumblr. don't go there

xp
wait a minute: banned from twitter, lives in Florida... 🤔

where am i supposed to post unreasonably niche observations now? a thought i've only just seen.

Fuck no I haven’t deleted my account. Twitter is fucking amazing and has been an enormous net positive in my professional life. Instagram and Facebook can go to hell though.

l-r: my 401k match, me

me reaction to the news that a social media platform will now be owned by an evil billionaire pic.twitter.com/1tEMrlyjvW

— bolty (@AmbJohnBoIton) April 25, 2022

I'm just going to simply mute Elon Musk as a topic and live with whatever happens.

Years ago. I thought recently of re-upping, but given the current news I'll pass.

twitter is a website for lazy narcissists who are wrong about everything

hell yeah

Will there still be a board of directors at twitter or will MUSK be dictator

I chose I will never quit even though I might quit someday. Elon buying Twitter didn't make me want to immediately leave, but I could imagine him running it into the ground. It's perfectly fine now and I'm on there a lot, following the news and my various personal interests. I actively mute anything that doesn't interest me or that I don't want to see, and I steer clear of personalities I outright despise.

elon hasn't bought it yet, deal will close in 3-6 months. so no point quitting now

Chose will never quit but depending on what changes get brought in I might. Change of ownership by itself not enough for me, tech giants always owned by horrible people.

I don't see the point of treating the overpriced battery on wheels man as an exceptional scumbag, they're all horrible.

Stopped using Twitter in late 2016, exactly 10 years to the day after I joined. Didn't delete my account, but basically unfollowed everyone. Occasionally use it when I want to find something out in real-time, or to read a thread which someone has linked to here. Don't miss it at all.

Deleted my account 3 weeks or so before Musk joined the board. Was no longer enjoyable or useful to me.

Agree with Calzino that Musk isn't more pernicious than other billionaires. For those who plan to stick with Twitter his plans to loosen the moderation of it are probably still troubling, tho.

I like it, I mainly just follow all the retro gaming people and it's all good fun. I follow some comedians too, but have generally found that I only enjoy Blain Capatch stuff. Hopefully whatever happens once the deal is in won't affect my usage, we'll see.

Musk is worse/worst on Twitter due to the performative petulance in recent years even if that's mostly 'just' insults against others. But this is pretty much just the 'is Trump the figurehead worse than countless lower profile Republicans? Actually...' argument.

Worse no, more annoying yes. But annoyance is a valid reason to quit a social network, ofc.

No plans to quit. I'm rarely pissed off by content.

twitter is a website for lazy narcissists who are wrong about everything

my running assessment has been "Twitter encourages psychological projection to a point that it feels like that's all the site does"

Never signed in but read it. No ads!!!

Twitter can’t be all bad, it has @Cats of Yore

and fantastic one joke accounts like politicians hair on football managers

it was all downhill after Your Aunt Diane stopped tweeting in 2012

https://twitter.com/YourAuntDiane

I agree tech company owners are universally despicable, but this was the last major thing I read about Musk so I think there's a case to be made that he's even on the bad side of the tech billionaire spectrum: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-03-25/black-tesla-employees-fremont-plant-racism-california-lawsuit

otoh, I still have an IG account and I don't think Elon has facilitated a genocide yet, I'm typing this on a macbook etc.

https://i.imgur.com/IP36jUH.jpg

the chaff to wheat ratio on twitter is still too high though better obv than FB (actually FB has gotten better in this regard as I've unfollowed a million things and only look at posts from people I know, but I'm tired of the platform and UI now). that said, twitter has a unique ability to completely ruin my day so I'm going to stop looking at it so often. I avoided it for many years and only got really sucked in during the last year and a half.

Well ok but...twitter users are not the consumers of twitter products, which are advertising spots and user data. I don't really subscribe to this idea's most extreme versions—if you think of users as unpaid workers you have Terranova's "free labor"; if you prefer to think of them as the product being sold to the real consumers (advertisers) there's Smythe's "audience commodity"; or, popularly, "if the 'product' is free, you are the product." Those theories exclude a lot of what users get out of platforms & broadcast media, but nonetheless it's a fact that user-generated content creates the platform's value, so I don't think it's ridiculous to think about one's participation in social media as different from needing to consume goods and services under capitalism.

I'd say that a very small percentage of tweets are creating any value

sorry, I can't tell if that's just a joek or not

Only sort of. There are something like 500 million tweets per day, and the number of them that achieve high engagement, or are even read by another human, has to be pretty small. So unless you are a power tweeter you are only adding value in a butterfly-flapping-wings sense.

For me its as simple as weighing the utility of the site against my personal dislike of the oligarch in charge, and as it stands these days Prime Video continues to be good for my brain where Twitter is a dopamine addiction calibrated to piss me off between good jokes and obscure political pals

xp
Ah ok got it. So I perhaps unhelpfully combined two points:

1) Users create all the content on Twitter. If the users don't tweet, no one will visit twitter.com. This is the "free labor" theory* more or less: that the unwaged labor of tweeting is what creates the bulk of the company's value. It is true that much/most of this content goes essentially unseen, which is one reason likening it to wage labor isn't totally convincing, even apart from the issue of how users understand their own behavior on the network (generally speaking: not as labor). But at any rate, it's still significant that Twitter doesn't employ people to create content or even license it from elsewhere—compare to e.g., Netflix or Spotify—they get it for free from their users.

* tbf Terranova's theory predates the rise of social media and was more applied to people doing things like open-source software development, which more clearly resembles wage labor. It was also applied to blogging (I can't remember if she did that or people picked up on it from her), which also bears a resemblance to the waged labor of media production. OTOH media workers are often expected to tweet as part of their job responsibilities, so some of these lines get murky fast and that's not even mentioning influencers.

2) Users are the audience for all the content on twitter. Twitter sells this audience to advertisers and if you've ever played around with soc med advertiser tools, you'll know this isn't a metaphor, you can get quite specific with demographic targeting. Without users looking at tweets, there is no audience to sell. For advertising, it doesn't really matter which tweets users see, you just need them to pay attention to their feed / the site. And even if you never tweet or like a tweet or even make an account, you will still be sold to advertisers. Plus your behavioral data is commoditized, and, thanks to that, every single tweet holds some value even if no user sees or engages with it.

Sorry if this is all rather 'splainy; I don't have a good sense of how much non-academic people care about this stuff.

rob, have u read The Twittering Machine?

i would rather use ilx

but tweets are now toots!

i will give mastodon a try if it survives the next few weeks lol.

I'm reading up on how it works. Seems like it'd work well with a number of small- or mid-sized servers, and the amount of traffic you'll get is completely dependent on what users on your server subscribe to. You can have the front page be a variation of the classic firehose ofall the toots (lol) from your server, plus those from all accounts that the users on your server subscribe to.

I think it'd scale super well with a myriad of small to mid sized servers with the most popular users not all being on the same ones. Obviously this is the opposite of what's happening.

It felt like I was picking the geocity I wanted to live in all over again. I’ll never use this thing.

I mean, we could collectively all join one instance, take a vote as to whether we want to keep it going, and then roll on or shut down

what would be the difference between that and ilxor.com

you could follow/retoot (?)/interact with other people not on ilx

i tried to sign up to the tribel offering the other evening.
very buggy and constant performance issues.
its going to take a lot for me to completely quit twitter.
i rarely see anything too unpleasant due to a small echo chamber setup on it.
a few news/journos + record labels + bands + producers + music nerds.
and little else.
makes my twitter experience rather enjoyable.

i would be super down for trying a ilxor mastodon (he says, not knowing anything)

i hate twitter and have started reading it compulsively even though its just people saying 'normalise breadsticks' or posting screenshots of sitcoms i've never heard of with the caption 'yass kween' and would be glad if this guy ruins it just enough so that it breaks my compulsion. I remember being hooked on FB years ago and then it got really boring all of a sudden so hopefully that happens soon and I can go back to only watching fashion shows on youtube.

people always think that whatever website will obsess them forever but like remember when nobody could stop posting on ilx and you would like try to post on a thread and every time would get the skipping messages thing and now the only thing anybody posts about are twitter drama and whether ilx is dead

you go girl

im not even being rude about ilx, it was obviously better than twitter which is just total gibberish

breadsticks should maybe be normalized

remember when nobody could stop posting on ilx and you would like try to post on a thread and every time would get the skipping messages thing

yes I do, rvturn

Deleted all my tweets - going read only from here on out.

Can't really quit Twitter per SE, all 16 of my accounts are banned.

I am going to be the last on there. I'll be reading the last tweet.

lightweight unless you *post* the last tweet

There really isn’t a comparable place to Twitter. Am I supposed to hop on Instagram and write like “the only slasher icon who believably eats ass is Jason Voorhees” underneath a photo of some nice leaves I saw

— Vinnie Mancuso (@VinnieMancuso1) November 4, 2022

^ perfect description of why I never liked Twitter right there!

There are literally infinite ways you can shape your own experience with twitter, and that is ONE of them. But ok.

He could just post a picture of Jason on Instagram and write the same thing for crying out loud. Hell, he could write a whole essay on it over there.

i signed up for post, haven't followed anyone yet, but the "posts" it's serving me make it seem like a parler or truth social for resistance libs lol

like, this was the first thing i saw when i logged in today: https://post.news/article/2J8SVsZ2IBvBJ2sXxIprQXFciTx

fucks sake.

lol get yer "You Don't Know Jack" trading cards here

mastodon is good imo

Getting better fast too.

As soon as people on ilx start posting Mastodon links instead of tweets I’ll have to switch

Tweetshelf is no longer free :(

I think this is related to Twitter charging to access its API, so sites that are built on it need to create revenue stream.

Tiwtter app got cross at my never checking it anymore, started sending me random tweets it thought I might like, so I uninstalled it.

is it weird to have not quit but to have the platform essentially beg/dare you to every day?

Feel like this needs a do-over. I'm pretty sure I voted that I'd never quit, but I left months ago. I was hoping for some End Days of Twitter excitement until a final blowout but it's more just drawn-out and boring.

i still haven't quit. there are a handful of people / pubs i find valuable. and nice art bot accounts and stuff that are too good to let go of for me, too good of a time waste and a distraction. also stuff like my regional office of the national weather service, who also posts on facebook, but good luck getting updates on chron order there. i thought mastodon might do it for me but it was too much work :|

Mastodon feels pretty similar to me. I don't quite understand people's issues with it beyond "I fear change". Having said that, I haven't got anything that feels like a community on there yet, but I put that down to me having run out of steam on most social media platforms - I didn't post much on twitter before I left and I haven't posted much on Mastodon, so there's no real reason for anyone to follow me if they don't already know me.

I keep thinking about joining tumblr for the lols, but I've thought about it for over a decade and never done it.

pubs i find valuable

Eh you can just call up for opening hours, no need to follow on social media.

is it weird to have not quit but to have the platform essentially beg/dare you to every day?

― rob, Tuesday, 4 April 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Hate that dog, but I'm still not quitting.

Same. It's the only place where I feel some sense of community with other people who make a similar type of music. No idea if that also exists on Mastodon or how to find it tbh.

My huge problem with Mastodon is there's no search. I know that's a fundamental decision for them and it's not changing, but search on Twitter is hugely useful in so many ways. That's what makes it very difficult to discover/visit all those communities that you're not part of

my bot host has had the plug pulled by twitter. it's as if 58,000 voices cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

After 8 years and 58440 bots... CBDQ has come to an end. Thank you to @GalaxyKate & to everyone who has made a bot. It's been a pleasure. pic.twitter.com/8C6gXzuRRX

— v buckenham (@v21) April 6, 2023

Repeated, targeted harassment against any account will cause the harassing accounts to receive, at minimum, temporary suspensions.

The words “cis” or “cisgender” are considered slurs on this platform.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 21, 2023

cool cool cool

Great meeting you today @elonmusk! We had multifaceted conversations on issues ranging from energy to spirituality. https://t.co/r0mzwNbTyN pic.twitter.com/IVwOy5SlMV

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) June 21, 2023