Toxicity on twitter is huge but once you unfollow toxic users (or any user who tweets nonsense too often) things look much better. Tbh I don't use twitter to engage in conversations. I use it mostly to consume interesting content.
I'm not sure where this leads but it can't be good.
You can see everyone else is constantly tweeting about how awful the Capulets are - your friends mostly aren't, but they're retweeting people who are. You remember one time you expressed some doubts about something the Montagues did and people you don't know turned up to tell you off. You think the Capulets might actually be right about something this one time, but you don't dare say it.
Private conversations give you more room to be wrong, to be uncertain, to be curious, to be uninterested. On Twitter you always have an audience.
To get noticed everything has to be larger than life and this tends towards hostility and partisanship.
Observations: I know longer expend energy thinking about the terrible state of discourse on twitter, the sanctimony, bad faith, etc. Also, my thought patterns seem to be changing, my brain feels like it has “spare capacity” and I find myself starting new hobbies. Just anecdata, but I am certain I am calmer and less worried about twitter destroying humanity!
I think it's super cool to be able to interact with different people doing interesting things (a little like HN, but it's easier to remember who the people are where as on HN I never remember 99% of the usernames in threads).
If you want to be extreme about it, you can put everyone in lists and then this won't happen. You can also use a third party client that doesn't do this.
My main Twitter complaint is the ads. There are so many and they suck. I'd much rather have Twitter premium that removes the ads.
There are no ads in third party clients such as Tweetbot.
Are you using the reverse chronological timeline? That's the only way to fly.
Twitter is so because it is designed to encourage arguments (to generate "engagement") and you can avoid it.
They tell you when your tweets are reported even if no action is taken, just to make you mad that people are reporting you.
They tell you when someone blocks you and you can't visit their twitter anymore even though you can if you log out.
Who would build a system like this unless they wanted to fuel drama?
There are people that are very good friends of mine in Real Life, but their Twitter profiles show a completely toxic persona. This doesn't happen with their other social media profiles.
TikTok on the other hand shows up higher more "feel-good" content which is why it's the only social media app I have installed on my phone.
I don't know toxic people on twitter behaving the same on other social networks.
* assuming that Twitter is mostly toxic
* or that avoiding toxicity isn't mental work
What is it where I'm wrong, and if so, why?