Anybody else going to quit Twitter? | Hacker News Reader

Anybody else going to quit Twitter?

14 pointsnr2x28 comments

It’s just not enjoyable, the shark jump was years ago.

Why leave now?

I find it ironic how polarizing and toxic Twitter has become, so I welcome an extreme change of ownership.

Granted Elon is intentionally trolling Twitter folks and after all the legal threats and comments made by staff, I don't blame him.

I say, let's see where it goes. I welcome the change and it seems like even Jack Dorsey does as well.

I agree, this is the single most exciting event happening at twitter from a technological point of view. why miss it?

If you're not using Twitter to make money, you should not be actively* on it. Period. You will lose your sanity fast.

If you are, Twitter can be a good place because you have a goal of selling and the trolls/rage become "part of doing business". You can even leverage them to sell more and gain more attention.

*By active, I mean using it daily. It's ok to view individual tweets that other sites have linked to.

Everyone on Twitter is selling something. Products, outrage, themselves.

Basically all on social media, yes, most without business model.

I still don't know why Twitter is a thing in the first place. I guess it has never been as successful as the other social media companies.

I used it briefly years ago. I found it was good for only two things.

1) very fast eye witness reports for something I cared about before mainstream media covered it. This wasn't a huge use case.

2) publicly complaining about customer service for a company, getting a quicker resolution than if you didn't publicly complain.

I never found a set of people whose tweets were interesting enough to be worthwhile. I think the issue is tweets themselves. The short message format just isn't long enough to say anything interesting for the most part. Don't get me started on longer messages split up into lots of separate tweets. Ughh.

Why now? I have high hopes that there will be some new changes in that dumpster fire after so many years. The ownership change was long time due.

I've been trying to quit twitter for years but there's some people I like who use it and despite dipping into Mastodon about every six months for the past five years, I've still struggled to find anyone I care about following there.

I’m taking the opportunity to reshape my digital life around the POSSE model. I’ve always considered that the right way to go about it, but I haven’t done the best job of actually doing things that way.

https://indieweb.org/POSSE Publish (on your) Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere

I’ve seen too many publishing platforms fail at this point. Even ones that, at the time, seemed too big to fail. Geocities, MySpace, Orkut, G+, and so many others have failed. Now Facebook and Twitter aren’t looking so hot. I don’t even believe YouTube is invulnerable. Lesson learned.

I joined Twitter for the curated news feed.

You can still set your feed to timeline so you don’t get anything the algo feeds you.

I’m staying; my feed is a great source of news and opinions from various prominent scientific, tech and hacking people.

This. I’ve been a happy Tweetbot user since it came out in 2011. The best (no, I mean it) feature that has made it worth paying for time and time again is that it’s a _chronological_ feed and not an algorithmic one. I see updates from people I follow. When there are no more updates, the feed ends. That’s it.

They’ve gotten way more aggressive, even in timeline. I see tons of trash from people I don’t follow.

I found most senior tech folks are gone or just tweets non-sense these days. 2012-2017 was a good curve, I think. Like I feel no one is actually give a shit about tech sanity anymore. It's all somewhat identity competition now. Tech brands and business, everyone stopped giving a shit about hacking.

Quality of ideas went down. Troglodyte fueled collapse.

Unless you have some actual news or content to post, Twitter is best consumed passively and anonymously.

It’s real easy to not follow assholes on Twitter. Just don’t follow anybody who is posting BS. If someone’s tweets are irritating to you it’s not worth following them. Just block and move on. You’ll forget about them, and you won’t develop FOMO.

I’ve followed this rule since day 1 and I contend Twitter remains the BEST social platform.

They started including tweets from people you don’t follow ages ago. The “don’t follow trash” no longer works.

No, why?

If you were going to leave, you should have left in protest when they started censoring people, promoting politics and refusing to stop fake media.

Social media has sucked for a long time, I'm just interested to see whatever happens to Twitter

Social media is awesome. I'm very happy to have Google Photos, Signal group threads, and certain subreddits in my life.

Free-for-all "town squares" where no one knows or cares about each other are awful and always have been.

Facebook went to shit when they started letting you see and interact with random strangers. And that's always been a feature of Twitter.

Humans just aren't built to have productive, positive conversations with hundreds of millions of other people, bots, and nation-states. It's insane that anyone thought these products would be good for us.

Here is a dystopian vision. Randoms halfway around the world orchestrate a social gathering targeting say young rich attractive available women/men/misc who are then cunningly knocked out by date rape drug. Their lifeless limp wrist body is carried off into the night underneath a coat by dracula's minions of organized crime and the rest is an unhappy ending for all except the one percent in this scene that noone ever sees.

MySpace.

I think it depends on how invested people already are and the sunk cost fallacy effect that will keep them on when there are no real signs that government, AI, corporate controlled social media will improve us.

Not really. What's done is done as far as them having my data goes. The fundamentals of the app haven't changed yet and I plan to evaluate anything else based on the future.

I stopped using it years ago. Echo chambers corrupt minds and are bad for the soul.

I think there will be many that come back…

I plan a stickybeak 6 months in the new year after all the noise has died down. Definitely will follow Elon M. I already did before I left when Elon's adventures were going through a crazy financial rough patch. I remember the gif he tweeted when they got through an earnings call. So funny. And still makes me chuckle that he got through the obstacle course of establishment force of gravity against new nice things without the toxic old fossil fuels. My sign on number hasn't changed but I forget the handle I used.

Yea, just did.

No.

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