have you quit twitter yet?

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.

Yeah agree with that, lack of an edit button isn't going to end Twitter.

I think the observation about newsletters has something to it though. It is interesting that the most promising new money-maker for writers is via our last federated social network.

tumblr is still good btw

Without Twitter, I feel so disconnected from The Discourse. I don't need to tweet about it or read a bunch of unrelated bullshit that I don't care about. But I want to know what's going on.

There used to be app called Nuzzel that basically aggregated the most popular links that people you followed were sharing, and so you could log in and instantly see, for instance, a juicy scoop that had just dropped that everyone was talking about. I liked it as a way to get up to speed after being offline for a few hours. But I think someone also once described it as methadone for Twitter addicts. Anyway, Nuzzel was shut down a couple of years ago, and now the concept has been integrated into Twitter Blue. Which means that the only way to experience it again requires not only logging into Twitter but also paying for the privilege.

So far, the best substitute I've found (apart from refreshing ILX and the NYT website more frequently) is the Today in Tabs newsletter, but that's of course limited by what that one guy finds interesting. I wonder if I'll eventually just lose the desire and stop caring about What's Happening on the Internet (seems unlikely).

I have twitter and look at twitter but otherwise don't really interact with twitter. But lately I've been getting pushed a bunch of tweets from GOP assholes - like Desantis, Pompeo, Jim Jordan - who are followed by reporters I follow, which is making me really suspicious. Like, I get why a (say) CNN reporter would follow Jim Jordan (for example), but that same CNN reporter likely follows a millions politicians and political figures and the like. So why does Twitter's algorithm keep cherrypicking conservative asshole tweets to serve up?

They're surprisingly upfront about it at least?
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-politicalcontent

Huh. It's definitely weird to me, because it's only ramped up in the last week or so, and the algorithm should recognize (based on who I follow, and block) what I would or would not be interested in. Like, I don't want tweets from Nancy Pelosi, either, but if the robot was going to pick between serving me bullshit from her and bullshit from Jim Jordan, it should already know the answer before it even asks the question.

I know different people like different things, but I can fathom looking at Twitter in anything other than reverse chronological order.

Yeah, Twitter is chaotic enough without an algorithm feed.

Tweak New Twitter browser extension improves everything:

Overview
Remove algorithmic content from Twitter, hide news & trends, control which shared tweets appear on your timeline, and improve the UI
Remove algorithmic content:

– Keeps you on the Latest Tweets (chronological) timeline, automatically switching you back if Twitter tries to move you to the "Home" (algorithmic) timeline
– Hides the new timeline tabs if you have them
– Hide "Who to follow", "Follow some Topics" etc. in the timeline
– Hide "What's happening", "Topics to follow" etc. in the sidebar
– Hide "More Tweets" when linked to a tweet
– Hide algorithmic tweets based on likes, replies, lists, and suggested topics in the "Home" timeline, if you use it
– Hide Explore page contents

Control which tweets shared by people you follow appear on your timeline:

– Move Retweets to a separate timeline (default setting), or hide them entirely
– Move Quote Tweets and replies to them to a separate timeline, or hide them entirely (off by default)
– Hide tweets quoting accounts you've blocked or muted
– Mute quoting of specific tweets - adds a "Mute this conversation" menu item to Quote Tweets in the timeline

Chrome version. Firefox version.

Today is my 10-year Twitter anniversary. I haven't tweeted in over three weeks, which is surely the longest such period during the past decade. I've looked at tweets when they've been posted elsewhere, and I've also occasionally gone in and searched for stuff. I'll go so far as reading replies to whatever I'm clicking on. But what I haven't done is scroll through my own feed.

As I expected, I've been reading ILX more during the times when I otherwise would've been scrolling Twitter, which doesn't necessarily solve the basic compulsive tendency, but it feels less addictive. I still feel cut off from the discourse, but might be coming to terms with that, as the FOMO wears off and it becomes out of sight, out of mind. ✌️

I changed a couple of settings, and already my twitter experience (as such) is radically different. Suddenly it's all just ... settled down. I don't follow many people anyway, but now there's not nearly as much (or really any) garbage jumping to the front of the queue. It's just boring ol' posts from people every few minutes, which, yeah, really tramps down that dopamine hit and seems much less likely to get my outrage machine running, both good things.

I follow 1,300 people or so, and it's a fairly steady stream most of the time. Can't imagine what it's like for the psychopaths who follow like 30,000.

1,300 accounts, I mean (not all of them individual people)

lol I follow ... 82?

I appear to be following 2800 people, which is definitely insane, and mainly due to being polite.

Tweak New Twitter browser extension improves everything:

Thank you so much for this. That new Related Tweets thing was driving me up the wall.

i follow 120 people and have made 1,100 tweets in 14 years. maybe i am not even using twitter in the first place, statistically

i've made 21,422 ilx posts in roughly the same time period, and i think there's a lot more than 120 regulars here

I use Twitter to talk to my irl friends as well as Twitter pals. And since my brother died, it's become a real lifeline for keeping in touch with his friends in the very lowest-key way possible. Plus jokes.

I wonder if people use Slack for liek small freinds groups