How to Gradually Exit Twitter | Hacker News Reader

How to Gradually Exit Twitter

balajis.com

65 pointssaadalem56 comments

Kind of silly to insist on a newsletter versus a blog and direct folks to a $30 a month service. You can get a free blog on Tumblr or Wordpress.org. You can get one for $5 at somewhere like Micro.blog. There's plenty of ways to setup a personal blog that works well for both long posts and short posts. All of those have mechanisms to crosspost to social media or turn into a newsletter, if you want. But the focus on that solution is silly-- the open web is here, it's great, and blogs are a solid technology. RSS works well and makes it easy to syndicate all over.

I am personally quite happy using Micro.blog for my blog [micro.json.blog](https://micro.json.blog). It's hosted Hugo (which is what I used for my blog before) setup with a micropub service already and hooked into most of the tech and standards coming through the Indieweb movement.

Blogs are the answer to twitter. Newsletters are just a potential answer to monetization for a limited set of folks.

If your audience is hardcore HN readers, this is true. Most normal people have an email address but not an RSS reader. And without that a blog is a completely different thing, requiring you to actively check it.

Newsletters can also make things not-completely-public without a user account system.

That's true that most people don't have an RSS reader. It's also true that:

1. Most people don't want your newsletter in their inbox. 2. Most people still find content on social media. 3. RSS _as a technology_ can be used to syndicate to both newsletters and social media.

That's why I think POSSE[^1] is the right, powerful concept.

On "not-completely-public" content-- I don't think that this post, and most of the "leave Twitter/Facebook" posts are directed at the small number of private accounts-- private accounts don't have the same discovery problem. The exception is if you're talking about "not-completely-public" for the purposes of monetization. To that I say: 1. Twitter doesn't solve that; 2. That's a completely different problem; 3. A blog, syndicated to social media, is still probably the best tool to enable new people to discover your content.

Any number of mechanisms, whether Patreon, Locals, Substack, Mailchimp, Memberful, Github Donations, and on and on may make sense for monetization. Wordpress and Tumblr also have built in mechanisms for monetization. But people aren't using Twitter for gated content that folks pay for-- that's just moving the goal posts.

[^1]: https://indieweb.org/POSSE

I was just about to come here and mention Micro.blog, and I'm impressed someone beat me to it. :) Of course, you can do it for even more cheaply than that if you're a bit technically savvy and willing to put in the effort. I like the idea of newsletters, but they strike me as a different kind of solution. Micro.blog is a great compromise between being Twitter-like and still allowing longer blog posts. (And still cross-posting to Twitter, to boot).

It's also worth noting that version 3 of the Ghost blogging platform has a newsletter system integrated into it, so if you fall into the "a bit technically savvy and willing to put in the effort" category, you can use that to put together a newsletter for less than $30 a month. And if you want a newsletter but still want someone else to take care of it for you, there's Substack, which lets you publish newsletters for free and, if you want to go paid, charges 10% plus credit card processing fees, which may end up working out to be cheaper than $30 a month for a lot of low-volume folks.

(My own Microblog: https://micro.coyotetracks.org)

The addictive value of twitter is that you can ping some quasi-famous person in your field and they will often engage in conversation. It's pretty magical. That's not gonna happen on my paid mailing list.

Actually, if a quasi-famous person happens to be in a mailing list (I'm talking abou mailing lists, not newsletters) then it might answer your emails and participate in a conversation.

The mailing lists I'm on almost always get relegated to a filtered folder where loads of things irrelevant to me come by (e.g. user support). Maybe I'm just on the wrong mailing lists, but the ability to subscribe, ignore, and boost threads is pretty valuable.

so... 1. mailing lists are noisy and 2. you don't check them very often.

regarding 1. isn't twitter noisy too?

regarding 2. can you really blame this on the mailing lists?

Or, to put it another way – this advice is for "famous" people like Balaji, and is untenable for most people on Twitter.

Twitter is different because everyone can both send and receive from the same account. This advice isn't for normal people, but rather for people who want to build an audience in a one-way-direction.

To my mind, trying this hard to circumvent a platform's huge and seemingly irremovable flaws instead of ditching it for good is a very unreasonable option. I'd say quit Twitter abruptly, not gradually--here's how:

- Do you want to follow the news? Try selecting reliable news outlets or aggregators (like HN) guided by your own criteria, so you can check their websites on a regular basis and stay up to date, if you're interested in that--I'd personally recommend sticking to local news.

- Do you want to follow specific people that publish content you find interesting on the Internet? Follow their personal websites or repositories.

- Do you want to publish content on the Internet yourself? Host a personal website. If you don't want to pay, consider using a decentralized option (Beaker Browser, .onion site, I2P, ZeroNet, etcetera).

That's it. Goodbye social media. RSS, bookmarks, and our good old memory are our best allies.

What if I want to ping the most famous researcher in my field and get a quick response? And then get recruited by an observer for asking such an insightful question?

This actually happens on twitter.

Arguably this is analogous to asking how will you hit a payout on a slot machine if you don't play. It sort of makes sense if as someone who plays slot machines literally has no more productive use for their capital than the sensation of losing it and the hope from occasionally "winning," just as someone on twitter has no more productive use of their surplus time. Sure, it's fun, and you can take it to the bathroom with you so you don't need to wear a diaper like you might need to at a casino, but it's an impoverishing and inferior vice.

Twitter and social media platforms that we compare to slot machines should be defined as a new form or class called Strange Games, wherein the only winning move is not to play.

I disagree only because I've had real contacts with personal giants on twitter dozens of times and never won anything at a casino. While I do spend more time on twitter, I believe this effect is more common than your analogy allows.

People into fringe academic topics are likely to see this effect more than people @ing along and kanye.

So, assuming I've built a site, how do I tell other people that I've written something?

It turns out, talking with other people who are interested in the things I write about is important in the initial stages of alerting people who may later choose to follow my website.

Where do these people talk? Today, that's Twitter. (To a lesser extent, HN. Reddit has a community, but most of those communities frown on submitting your own content.)

Creators stay on twitter because it is a free way to announce to interested parties that you have made A Thing. Any other service that has sufficient people will end up having the same problems we see on Twitter.

All of that is incredibly inconvenient and 99% of users who aren't ye brilliant few HN users won't know how/won't bother. Content discoverability goes down the toilet as well, so information democratization suddenly moves backward a decade.

Is it even possible to avoid Twitter though? Many frontpage articles from HN to mainstream news such as CNN consist in single links to a tweet. So I inevitably end up clicking on it like many people and there you go. Back on Twitter.

Twitter really is just poison.

I visit it once a week and exclusively follow programming related accounts. Even then I feel misanthropy and disgust seep in to my head.

Something inherent to Twitter makes it such a horrible place. Is it the character limit? Me always seeing what everyone reposts/likes? The way the feed is built? No idea. But I hate it.

And the worst part? It gives me very little in return. The occasional sneak peak at a products’ road map or strategy. Maybe release notes all in one place.

Fundamentally the tendency towards short posts prevents any nuance or complexity and reduces everything to black and white. This is a poor model for the realities of the world.

People seem to lap it up though. Most Twitter accounts consistently post snappy 1-2 sentence blunt statements and I'm always surprised at the responses.

I was on twitter early - user id is 10,000 something. It wasn’t always like this. Back in the early days it was amazing. I learned so much by following people who were doing interesting things on technology. Over the past 6 years or so it’s become angry and toxic. The current political situation doesn’t help but it was bad before that. I’m not sure what the cause was or if it’s repairable. I do know I miss the twitter of 10 years ago.

Getting someone to leave a social media platform like Twitter voluntarily is probably just as good as getting them kicked off. Either way they lose access to the potential for rapid audience expansion that is enabled by the dynamics of the platform.

Sure, they can service their core audience on any publishing platform: an email newsletter, a blog, etc. But it's much much harder to get a rapid audience expansion in one of those channels. That's why they were on Twitter in the first place, instead of (or in addition to) emails and blogs. It's not like email newsletters and blogs are some new untested idea; they both predate Twitter by almost a decade. Twitter (and other social platforms) has succeeded because it offers upside that those don't.

People love that big audience pop on social media when it helps them quickly build their brand or find new customers. They don't love it when it exposes them to a larger set of critics. Going to less dynamic channels is one way to lower the volume of criticism, but you lose the potential for positive dynamics as well.

No, the problem is you have to discount that audience by the risk of it getting destroyed overnight by an unsympathetic Twitter admin/moderator. And by the high difficulty of cashing it out. And by deboosting algorithms that will limit your reach.

Accounting for this, I don't think it's a stretch to say that having 1,000 people on a platform you control is much better than 10,000 Twitter "followers". Maybe even 100,000 depending on how much Twitter likes you.

> you have to discount that audience by the risk of it getting destroyed overnight by an unsympathetic Twitter admin/moderator

While I have a lot of issues with Twitter, statistically speaking, the chances of this happening seem to be very, very, very small. Twitter is not full of rogue "moderators" running rampant permanently deleting people's accounts left and right. You have to be (a) willfully spreading material that clearly violates Twitter's terms of service (cf. Alex Jones), (b) ignoring repeated warnings and essentially daring Twitter to enforce their own TOS (cf. Alex Jones), and in most cases, (c) high profile (cf. Alex Jones). It's easy to find people who are temporarily banned from Twitter for dubious/spurious reasons, but it's pretty hard to find people who are punted without warning for "going against the groupthink, man."

Statistically speaking most people don't have a big audience on Twitter either. As your audience grows so does the chance of somebody at Twitter having a problem with you. If you're on Twitter because of this potential for massive growth you have to take it into account.

Had it happen to myself. Absolutely no warning from Twitter. Never had a temporary ban at all. And wasn't even a remotely big account. Of course you don't hear about this from people who aren't super high profile - they cannot make a lot of noise about it. Amongst my friends who are heavy Twitter users there are absolutely tons of stories like this.

When I left Twitter a couple years ago, I "slammed the door on my way out" by deleting all my posts. Of course, we all know social media companies keep deleted posts and metadata but crawlers probably can't see this data (unless they pay?) and it sends a message as well.

I've not quit Twitter, but I've reduced my usage of it (and gained control of my data) by syndicating my posts/statuses from to Twitter and backfeeding any replies/likes as comments on my blog.

It's all simple enough to get setup using the IndieWeb Wordpress plugin.

I had a blog (still do, though I publish extremely infrequently), but the value of Twitter to me is the discussions, where I can ask about things and learn new things from people who reply to them. What's the equivalent for that in this system?

Now, if you said "get a personal domain and set up ActivityPub," then sure.

The other approach I've liked here is the "planet" model - I read https://planet.debian.org/ fairly frequently, and occasionally one blogger publishes something and a couple of people follow up a day or two later "This is a response to so-and-so's post, here are my thoughts," which is always fun. But it wouldn't be fun in a newsletter model - Twitter makes it so that you don't see replies from someone you follow to someone you don't, because those replies will generally lack context. I wouldn't want to spam everyone in my newsletter with "These are some questions I have for some other person whose newsletter you don't read."

Writing blogs, and writing response to blogs, is a significantly better mechanism for most conversation on the web. Short posts, and replies, have all the problems that comments have had all along.

Still, short posts are great, and represent probably 90% of my own blogging. Webmentions/ActivityPub are great starts to getting all of this tied together better.

Just a quick plug for two ActivityPub projects that are wholly compelling and are not Mastodon:

* WordPress ActivityPub plugin by Matthias Pfefferle: https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

* WriteFreely - An open source platform for building a writing space on the web: https://writefreely.org/

I understand the negative opinions about Twitter that have been mentioned, but this isn't advice for _most_ people. This is advice for people who already have an audience built, and are looking to own their audience.

The benefit (and downfall) of Twitter is that (blue checkmark aside), everyone is equal. Your account can both send and receive, and it puts everyone on the same 280-character level playing field. Balaji doesn't like this.

Balaji might want to pick up his ball and leave, and that's fine (odd he blames the hacks and not his recent Twitter spat, but whatever). But Twitter has managed to give a voice to so many people and ideas that otherwise never would have been heard. This doesn't solve that problem; it just makes it so Balaji can write what he wants without having to hear people disagree with him.

If you're reading this and are against Twitter, that's fair! But it's likely that you and Balaji are looking to exit Twitter for very different reasons.

Switching to the Fediverse is also an option, especially since the variety of instances there means that one can curate their experience in a much greater way than one would on Twitter.

> Switching to the Fediverse is also an option

Really only if the people you want to interact with on Twitter are either already on the Fediverse or can be persuaded to move across. In my experience, they're not and they won't be. Which is why I still have an active Twitter account.

fosstodon.org is a great instance that I imagine would suit the HN crowd.

How does this post address network effects in the age of aggregation? Who has sufficient incentive to tie all those disparate blogs and newsletters together? Balaji likes to talk about exit plans. See this speech at YC startup school:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A

In general, they strike me as deeply unrealistic.

A worthwhile question to ask is why is this being written now?

Twitter has had hacks before, so I don't buy the 'hacks are the last straw' line.

I don’t think this is because of the hack. Balaji seems more worried about censorship and “cancel culture.”

Ex: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/n7w3zw/silicon-valley-eli...

Quoting Vice in that article, defending journalists:

"many journalistic outlets are increasingly moving away from an ad-based revenue model driven by traffic, and instead ... optioning their articles to movie studios ..."

Emphasis mine, but I can't believe Vice admits their business model is creating stories they can turn into Hollywood films. That doesn't align with reporting the truth. "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story".

But that does explain a lot. Bloomberg's "The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies" was totally unsubstantiated garbage, but it does sound like a plotline from a Hollywood movie.

True. Though the bottom line is publishers saying "we need to get money somehow", and readers mostly not enthused by paying for a subscription. So if it's not ads and the often-paired click bait, it has to be something else, itself paired with something else.

I definitely do not condone that, especially for outlets present to inform the general public, but they're businesses after all.

The only part of Vice that's worth giving the benefit of the doubt when it comes to The Truth is their Motherboard section. The rest has been tripe for a few years. There was a glimmer of hope with Simon Ostrovsky's reporting from Ukraine, but he seems to have moved on.

I'm no fan of Twitter, never had an account, and never will. But I'm curious where are these people going to go where there's no censorship and no "cancel culture"?

And how much of a cesspool is that sort of place going to be?

I mean, there are lots of niche discussion forums on the internet that are better and worse than Twitter for various reasons. For instance, LessWrong.com is popular in my niche and has a higher signal-to-noise ratio than Twitter, but contains a much smaller group of expert contributors and (by design) isn't good for short rapid discussion.

It only becomes a cesspool once it grows beyond the size where it can be moderated by users themselves. For example, I post on a soccer forum dedicated to a specific team. It's been around since 2000 or so, built using PHP forum software.

There is a shared culture between the users. While there are thousands of accounts, there are only a few hundred active users, so everyone 'knows' each to an extent. That's why when someone tells someone else that they're behaving badly, it's usually made in good faith. That creates a completely different feedback loop than on social media, where no one knows each other and their default position is to get defensive when called out about something.

These old-school forums still have admins, moderators and allow you to flag things like spam, hate speech etc, but they're rarely used, because when someone signs up for an account, you can assume that they're there to partake in the aforementioned shared culture.

This seems to stem directly from an ongoing harassment of a New York Times journalist:

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/hknija/whats_...

The harassment has been flowing in both directions.

you know the old phrase "two wrongs don't make a right"?

I didn't say they do. Just pointing that out, because your comment implied it was unidirectional.

My heart breaks for this rich, powerful man who has found a place in life where he can’t just ignore things he doesn’t like. It’s an embarrassment to subject someone like him to what non-rich, non-powerful people experience.

Cancel culture invariably effects the poor and powerless to a greater extent. The poor are shackled to their next pay check, the truely powerful cannot be cancelled.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Cancel culture effects the poor more than everything, here's a good threats about this topic with examples https://twitter.com/SoOppressed/status/1282404647160942598

My favorite is this article that details the case of a Palestinian business that is wrecked because of some very ugly tweets his daughter wrote seven years prior. Even after firing his daughter, they still kept punishing him. https://forward.com/news/national/448382/the-ceo-of-holy-lan...

Balaji seems to have an pre-existing motivations:

https://github.com/balajis/twitter-export

Balaji probably cares about everything he said (privacy, etc), but due to his recent spat on Twitter I feel like this is way more personal than he implies:

https://screenrant.com/clubhouse-fight-nyt-taylor-lorenz-bal...

tl;dr = him and a NYT writer got into a fight, both were wrong and acted in bad faith, and it mostly played out over twitter.

Gradual exits are for the birds (that tweet).

You can still read twitter without an account. Just delete your account(s) cold turkey.

The technology should exist by now for a decentralized twitter right? Resorting to email newsletters seems very clunky. Couldn't there be something that uses a bittorrent-like protocol, where the followers support the network for whomever they're following?

The W3C published ActivityPub as a recommendation (this is essentially a web standard) on January 23, 2018.

https://joinmastodon.org/ ?

how to abruptly exit twitter: quit

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