have you quit twitter yet?

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 have not! Would you recommend it? Seymour is the Lenin's Tomb guy, right?

yeah correct -- i quite liked it and there's a podcast called Our Regrettable Century hosted by a group of lefty burnouts that did a great three part series on it

thanking HOOS

this might be my first 'platform ditching' experiment. i feel like if i take the thing i really like about twitter (art account tweets) and make it more active research 'around the web' and in books on my part, it will be a more engaging and rewarding experience. i also have no professional reason to be on there and few followers. so it might actually take hold if i put in some effort. i guess i might miss being up on everything and having the occasional lol and trawling through random restaurant. but i think that stuff might be worth losing for the peace of mind, and also losing my login seems easier than unfollowing all of the annoying people. i never really understood the feeling of 'social media is a net drain on my life' until ca 2019-2020. like there was still an exciting or funny or engaging aspect to it up until that point. but i have a stronger feeling than ever that i need less of it. instagram for dj stuff and personal fb sounds manageable.

i guess i don't have to completely avoid the site if i lose my login either, like i can still check brisk god videos if i'm bored and tired lol

by 'lose my login' i think i mean deleting my account

the site is really unusable if you don't have an account

(one of the few good things about twitter)

i deactivated.

i also have no professional reason to be on there

See this was my mistake, putting all my eggs in DJ Twitter instead of DJ Instagram :)

perhaps the best solution to fixing Twitter is indeed to turn it off

i get most of the best parts of twitter (lit memes) when they show up on discord, and the worst parts of twitter (The Discourse, utter lack of healthy emotional boundaries) are a big part of, well, why i ghosted this site for like 20 months - just trying to learn how to interact with people in an emotionally healthy manner and shit.

it’s good to see you back here :)

Kate !!!!

y'all are sweet, good to see you again :)

@kate I read someone once saying Twitter was doomed because no one goes there to use it, it just gets repeated on other websites people do use.
But maybe that was too dire a prediction

I actually had to get a Twitter account as part of a class I am taking but luckily I already had one

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Ominous

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Only 8 elon socks here

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

― flopson, Wednesday, April 27, 2022 3:20 AM (one week ago)

This is kind of where I landed. If Musk actually does any of the deranged stuff he's said he might do, I will delete.

I will say while I recognize the truth of "all company owners are scum," there is something esp galling about how Musk wouldn't just be the owner of twitter he'd also be its most prominent user. Like if every time you bought something on Amazon a little animated Bezos popped up saying "thanks dawg" I would be even more hardcore about avoiding it, or if the app icon for Instagram was Zuckerberg's quasi-human face I would delete it instantly

there should be fines on Twitter tbh. i want bad tweeters fined.

Elon's Regret

Trying to quit Twitter because it'll be 10 years for me at the end of this month and that feels too long

I quit for like a year but went back. Made some changes though. Use different accounts now focused on different subject areas. So I can easily log out of a couple of them and still read about basketball. I also mute all replies and retweets, which cuts down on a lot of the low effort tweeting. I still leave quote tweets, but they are in a short leash. If it’s just people constantly dunking on others then I’ll either unfollow or mute. No hate follows.

I also don’t really tweet, I just consume. Very few interactions.

Why different accounts instead of lists?

I like the ability to log out of the account if I want to avoid that content for awhile. Introduces just enough friction for me to keep away. Too easy to switch lists.

I was surprised to learn that I've been on Twitter for eight years. I joined in 2014. That's six years until 2020 and two years until 2022, which is eight years. Six seven eight. Six plus two equals eight. That's how I counted up the total.

It's a lot easier than 2022 minus 2014. I don't have two thousand fingers and I can't mentally visualise two thousand separate things. Could I perform mathematical operations on large numbers by adding and subtracting the hairs on my forearms? No. My eyesight isn't good enough. It would be more practical to use pebbles. You might think this is just irrelevant waffle, but I'm actually exploring the limits of the human animal in isolation. I believe that the human animal can leverage its own body to amplify itself, without the use of technology.

But that's another topic for another time. In practice I think I've interacted with people on Twitter three times in total. I just use it to post links to my blog. One of the people I followed was Carrie Fisher's dog, Gary, but sadly that account was hacked by a cryptocurrency spambot. It does seem to have an official Instagram account though:
https://www.instagram.com/garyfisher/?hl=en

Why don't I interact with people on Twitter? Partially because my experience with social networks pre-Twitter has convinced me that it's not possible to have meaningful interactions with people you don't know. It's difficult enough figuring about people you went to school with, impossible with total strangers who only communicate with words. Partially because 140 character isn't enough to capture my awesomeness.

And there's the "had internet access before Twitter existed" factor, which is particularly relevant on Ilxor because this very website is older than most current internet giants. Amazon and the IMDB excepted. For an awful lot of people nowadays the internet is Facebook, Twitter, and to a slightly lesser extent Youtube - the idea of the internet as a medium that carries websites isn't a concept they are familiar with. But for you and I Twitter is Tuesday.

That's what links us, you and I. We alone can see the future stretching out ahead, because we saw the past; we were the past. All of this has happened before, and will happen again.

joined in november 2006, never logging off

That's right

i love twitter.
tweak your feed and its a very different experience.

congrats to the people who can use this platform without destroying their brains

tweak your feed and its a very different experience.

Indeed. Been there since March 2008.

The dopamine high I got from twitter was the most short-lived of any social media. It quickly became genuinely miserable for me to the point that I rarely feel any urge to go back. It felt like being in an overcrowded monkey house -- screeching on all sides, shit being thrown from every direction.

That’s actually a pretty good description of working there.

I still have a good time on twitter, but at this point I assume most of the people who ever followed me have me muted because the engagement ain't what it used to be. Either that or I'm just a worse person than I was 10 years ago.

I'm sure if I tweaked my feed and unfollowed a bunch of people, I would enjoy Twitter more than I do. But the main issue for me comes down to the intrinsically addictive quality of the platform. Whenever I have a spare moment, even walking from one room to another, I look at Twitter. If I do a good tweet, I obsessively check my notifications. I don't think I want to do that anymore. I don't like the way it has colonized my brain.

Whenever I have a spare moment, even walking from one room to another, I look at Twitter.

To be clear, this is hyperbolic. It's not every spare moment of every day, but it's often enough in moments like that that it feels...problematic. I want to know what happens to me when it's not influencing my habits so much.

Twitter is becoming a lost city. I explain the impending social media platform collapse my latest newsletter. https://t.co/5GigP1kS8V

— Annalee Newitz (@Annaleen) August 7, 2022

i don't disagree with the observation as an empirical observation, but the argument *why* that's happening doesn't make a ton of sense to me. twitter's leadership has always been unstable and (among users who are aware of it) very unpopular.

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