Goodbye, Twitter
sneak.berlin
sneak.berlin
Would you have said the same about the Declaration of Independence? Sometimes it is a great step forward in dissent to outline why you find the current regime intolerable and why you are leaving.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/king-speaks-for-...
Similarly, you could just not read it or downvote & move on
[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/awkward-look-monkey-puppet
If nothing else, the article felt genuine and coming from a place of them feeling a loss at having something they valued change so dramatically that it lost all value. I think we all feel that constantly in various ways with internet platforms and trends and can at least identify with where they're coming from. Even if we disagree with the specifics.
Yep. What about "..., I'm quitting [Twitter | Facebook | Medium | Etc..]" articles?[0]
P.S. All those articles' titles looks mostly clickbait for HNs; instead titles should at least in short form include "why" they do that.
My Mother's Windows laptop had malware so I used a free version of Malwarebytes to clean it up. When I opened up my Linux based laptop and logged into Facebook, the very first advertisement was for Malwarebytes. I have never seen a virus ad or basically any other software advert before.
I've never logged into anything using my name or email on her laptop. Amazon's Alexis was listening in the background but I never said "Malwarebytes" outloud. I did talk out loud about viruses. My phone was off because I forgot my charger. My Mother's phone was also off.
I ruled out Alexis for a variety of reasons. I can think only one possibility. Google Chrome, which we both use, is the mostly likely culprit. Chrome could have accessed the camera when I downloaded Malwarebytes, used facial recognition and shared that data with Facebook. Web pages are sandboxed but Chrome itself has complete access to hardware.
Its simple: as Mother's laptop & your laptop connected to the same router IP/LAN, Facebook may recognize all PCs as "family" and decide to drop similar ads to all in the house; alternatively if your Facebook profiles connected as "family relationship", ads may enter from back door.
0-day issue you missed to fix firstly: replace Windows to Linux on Mother's PC right before connect it to the Internet.
Next issue was your try to "fix Windows" using "freeware antivirus app".
I may not teach here, but that would be just ugly temporary workaround... but not fix.
Think, since 2020 there would be many "I'm quieting Internet" stories in the next few years posted by burnout Internet users, because mostly all of us (kids, adults & elderly) worldwide now preferably communicate online on a daily basis, staying at home due to pandemic.
Number of noobs[0] on the Internet, who never heard "Welcome to the Internet" greeting, actually drastically decreased.[1,2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noob
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_slang
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_Internet-related_t...
I wrote this not because I was leaving, but because of a change in state of Twitter: they didn’t censor search results before, and now they do.
I thought that was worth a post, not my departure. Nobody except my handful of friends cares about little ol’ me being on Twitter or not.
Hopefully, many more people care about widespread censorship.
If you’re using a censored platform with eyes wide open, that’s also totally fine; I wrote this because I considered myself an expert Twitter user and was myself terribly surprised that they had started censoring search.
I imagine most people that use the site are unaware of it, which is the only reason this post exists.
Unfortunately, even if you don't want to use Twitter, you're still affected by it. Aside from the risk of becoming the target of said mob, unfortunately, a large amount of public discourse and sometimes even official company or government announcements are only available through Twitter.
I've started using nitter.net for the unavoidable Twitter usage. It proides an alternative UI for reading Twitter which at least does away with some of the pressure to sign up to see tweets with replies/search, offers RSS, and doesn't require you to reload the page each time you click on a link because "something went wrong".
I'm not 100% sure their Tweet list is complete, and they're only as good as Twitter (i.e. if Twitter censors something, they still can't show it, the search for the banned hashtag is just as useless), but at least as a reader you're subject to a lot less of their dark patterns and hostile UX.
Although I've heard that even people without privacy extensions are getting hit by it, so it may just be a super aggressive bot detection that's randomly hitting everyone or some other bug that Twitter doesn't care because it presumably a) doesn't affect logged in users b) non-logged-in users who go there really want/need to see something (e.g. whether the US president is about to deport them) so they will put up with it and reload.
This will resolve the problem, at least temporarily.
You can disable service workers entirely by setting about:config dom.serviceWorkers.enabled to false.
I doubt Twitter would even exist without its current nature. 40% of Twitter users are lurkers and according to Twitter they have 500 million dormant users (people that visit Twitter without signing in).
I once bought tickets for a sold-out conference that way (at face value, not a scalper, just someone who had a ticket and couldn't go). I had to wire the money and would only learn at the entrance to the conference whether I got scammed or not. A quick scroll down the Twitter timeline of that person convinced me that I can most likely trust them, while at the same time clearly showing how much of a privacy disaster Twitter is.
I follow a few dozen people and don't observe ~any~ misunderstanding that it is very public. There's people that like to share, but they are obviously clear on what they are doing.
As a result, a lot of such messages ended up being public, and while each of them was innocent, all of them taken together were saying a lot about that person. And the latter may have been an implication that the person didn't realize.
What exactly are you afraid of missing out on?
I've never had a Twitter account and that has never been a problem for me. The overwhelming majority of my exposure to the site comes from screencaps, embedded tweets in blogs and articles, and the occasional link on HN.
For this one, he took the time to write a hyperbolic 2500-word rant using both high-minded language and profanity to compare the topic to human rights violations and abusive relationships, but couldn't find the time to remove the TWO Twitter accounts linked in their sidebar, or even actually delete those accounts.
As for sensationalized: https://sneak.berlin/20201029/traffic/
I'm sorry you didn't like it. I wrote about it because it was a big deal for me, having been a daily user of the site for a huge chunk of my adult life on the internet.
Twitter was one of those things that started out somewhat hackerly and interesting, welcoming bots and API users and third party clients, and is now a horse of a different color entirely. I thought that warranted a post, because it made me sad to see something really cool and fun become a victim of its own scale and popularity.
Currently just hosting on GitHub pages with their built in Jekyll support, but the mess of dependencies is kind of a hassle and Hugo seems nicer.
Using drone with caching for rubygems got my jekyll builds down to under 2 minutes (I use docker) but I imagine hugo will be under a second once I get it switched over. I’ll probably just commit the binary to the repo.
Shoot me an email if you’d like me to share the sources.
- Always under pressure to increase engagement to improve returns
- A marketing and lead generation opportunity for businesses
- A place to share useful information
- A place to share harmful information
- Creates opportunities for harm in the real world (bullying, misinfo from hacked accounts/state leaders using dumb passwords)
- A source of support/power for community and political organisations
And plenty more. This matches the definition of a wicked problem.
The worst part? If you leave, the problem is still there. There's no solution to this problem other than turning all social media off and banning all new social media.
(edit for formatting)
Is censorship bad? Yes. Is QAnon bad? Also yes. Is there an easy answer here? No. What we're doing as a society is running a massive experiment to see the results of several bad options.
Every time I see an article like this, the author doesn't take into account that there is no easy answer here, and that while censorship is bad, all the options are had.
The word you are looking for is 'dilemma'.
The censorship issues is frankly probably a small thing, in the big picture, it's the general toxicity, the addiction to word-bytes of irrelevance, the odd FOMO factor etc..
There are a few nice things about Twitter, but it's really quite easy to quit.
No. If you hover, it shows the full URL. There are extensions that replace all t.co links with the original ones.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=t.co&cat=...
- Due to public and political _profit_
Quick hn poll has _anyone_ seen anyone else talk about “Twitter rewrites any URLs”, Facebook, google or Hyperlink auditing?
- default feed display: was designed to give you their message - twitter: “it’s what we say is happening”
- engagement base timeline - again we only allow those that have passed our filters and tests to show you most content - another “it’s what we say is happening” tweak.
- defaults to switch all behaviors: and then planned re-defaults to get 80 of the 20 that switch back each time
WHY YOU SHOULD QUIT TWITTER NOV 4
MORE THAN ANYTHING: there’s a mouth breathing ugly person at twitter making these decisions and _they actually think you’re too stupid to realize all these changes gives them editorial control_
They think you’re too stupid, they think they’re done genius that got away with it, that you can’t put 2 and 2 together
They’re gloating right now - laughing at you
2 + 2 = 4
break free, don’t give your time to be told someone else’s version of what’s happening, your time is too valuable
Lock up political profiteers
>Spend time finding and deliberately interacting with smaller, community-operated online communities.
Like what?
You waited until Nov 2020 to quit Twitter?
You have some good points about how Twitter limits the API, and screws with your timeline and settings. I fully agree with those points. However, you seem to focus a lot on the 'bot' aspect of it. This made me suspicious as to why you would; we know a lot of disinformation campaigns use bots, so it can be a natural conclusion that some have grievances against Twitter for limiting what bots can do...
You also mention S.230: "How they expect to retain 47 USC §230 (CDA) protections with this behavior"
To me, that sounds like it's a reference to the EARN-IT Act, which is about the right's perceived censorship against them, and wanting to "punish" the likes of Twitter that "do that". Again, sounded suspicious to me.
Finally (after which I stopped reading), your example of "search censorship" on Twitter is about some QANON slogan (or something like that, I'm glad so say I don't want to know enough about them) - to me, that sounded even more of a grievance by someone on the right. As you stated earlier in the blog post, "their site, their rules"; I don't see it as a question of censorship - does prohibiting someone to yell 'FIRE!' in a crowded room constitute censorship, or preventing harm? I see it as preventing harm, by limiting the reach of something harmful (Just like France and other countries prohibit the display of Nazi symbols/paraphernalia).
Again, that's where I stopped; I don't write this to put you down, just that the way you say it doesn't validate your arguments in my eyes.
The author likes some bots, so he must be a Russian bot?
The author mentions §230, so he must be a right winger?
The author mentions a Qanon slogan as an example for censorship happening on twitter, so he must be a Qanon nut (I cannot be sure if the author calling out Qanon as a conspiracy theory movement was already present when you commented... but it is now at least)
As for censorship: yes, it's censorship that you're not allowed to scream fire, and it's one of the exceptions to free speech in the US that can be legally censored by the government. Not all censorship is automatically bad. Another example for "good" censorship would be child pornography.
The questions always are who does censor? and why do they censor? (and how do they publicly justify that censorship) and how sound and "obvious" is their argument?
Facebook censors nudity - as do most US TV stations (some under FCC rules) and a lot of other companies - even non-sexualized nudity, and arguments it's to protect viewers, especially kids, from naughty things. In Germany you will sometimes even see non-sexualized nudity - be it nipples or even "full-frontal" - on the public children TV channel (KiKa - Kinder Kanal). Is the US (corporate, sometimes government) approach to censorship of nudity the right one? Or the German one?
Censorship, and the reasons for it are seldom really black-and-white, and communities, from small groups, to social networks, to societies at large, have to reach some kind of consensus what goes and what goes not and reevaluate that consensus frequently.
The point is to justify when and why you censor, and from my understanding of what the author wrote, it seems the lack transparency, twitter implementing censorship with disregard for what their community wants (or at least part of it) from up top, and ever increasing amount of censorship that he disagrees with, not saying all censorship is automatically bad.
I myself tend to find myself on the "censor less" side of the argument usually, in case you wonder, tho shit like Qanon/"pizza comet" and their success sowed a little doubt recently, to be completely honest.
Anyone could say so is yours.
Like I said to the author, step back and view it from someone else's eyes. But if you don't want to try, your loss.
And I didn't even put forth an argument of whether I consider the author left, right, center, whatever. I poked and prodded your argument, because I found it to be extremely unsound (excluding the censorship discussion).
And frankly I fail to find any set of eyes I'd be comfortable with where I could follow your argument for the author being a Russian-bot supporting right wing Qanon based on what he wrote. Just too unsound and lacking any assumption of good faith on the authors part, casting him as what is - in these parts of the internet - almost (right wing) or defacto slurs (russian bot; Qanon).
Again, as for seeing with somebody else's eyes... well, I did for the censorship argument, didn't dismiss what you said outright (sorry if that wasn't clear enough) but put forth my own argument, that in part even agrees with what you said yourself.
Or for twitter I follow 3 people I aspire to be more like.
I had followed a fourth but too annoying so unfollowed.
The worst part was the feeling betrayal as I unfollowed personal friends and people I communicate with. Unfortunately even one like/retweet turns your profile into political garbage.
Censorship is very different than any other business decision that you make. Censorship is something that is done in response from government/media pressure. Censorship costs money, but it is a cost of doing business in places like China, and now it seems to be becoming part of the cost of doing business in the United States as well.
An additional point that I think many people are not realizing is that Twitter is the defecto medium that journalists and "informed citizens" use to get breaking news in the US. Sure there is a layer of indirection in the censorship, but how is this layer of indirection meaningfully different than the censorship done on the WeChat "platform"?
Anybody can post anything they want on their own sites, or a number of other completely unmoderated sites. People don't go there because their friends are already on Twitter. The conspiracy theorists follow because that's where the target is. They don't want to just post on their own site, or on sites where only other conspiracy theorists will read it. Even if those sites weren't perceived as garbage, people wouldn't go there simply because they don't know anybody.
It feels like Twitter and FB have the tiger by the ears and can neither let go nor continue to ride.
I think the real danger to Twitter is driving out the 'good' users because they don't want to be affiliated with the brand. The pandemic had the potential to end Twitter. To their credit, they realized it and did something about it.
A secondary concern is that the good users will start to retweet stuff that's borderline because they like what it says. I think we're already seeing that. There seems to be developing an attitude of "Well, it's not exactly correct, but it's probably sort of correct, so...[retweet/reply tweet]."
It has been an extremely shocking revelation. It is now 'wrongthink' on big sites like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc, to talk about the differences in men and women.
Terrifying stuff, when you can't even discuss or debate that.
You'd have to give some examples of suspensions in the other direction to help me understand.
the way Twitter take down NY Post is rather interesting. Even if NY Post story on Hunter Biden is false. Twitter allowed every news outlet to peddled Steele dossier and Trump golden shower in Moscow for years without banning.
edit: then Twitter restored NY Post account but ask them to delete the original post and repost...that just hilarious.
I also can't wait for the day where this type of regressive speech will look as ridiculous as the fear on homosexuals in bathrooms not so long ago, but we might need to wait a few more years for that.
The panic depends on the weird, contradictory belief that men need to dress up to assault women. Often from the same people who will insist all men are incredibly dangerous and do their harms out in the open. Actual doublethink.
It’s easy to get away with because a deleted account is indistinguishable from one that never existed in the first place.
Always be skeptical.