It's Time to Leave Twitter

I believe that this is more related to a political point of view than Twitter's quality itself.

Like the post said, this isn’t the first time Elon has acted this way. He posted the same sort of stuff years ago, also on Twitter. People who ignored him then can ignore him now.

But, just like when certain Twitter users enter public office, Elon being the CEO of Twitter has shined a giant spotlight on him, even outside of Twitter (like this very post we’re commenting on). Elon hasn’t changed, and honestly, not much of Twitter has either. But, by using Twitter, you are ever so slightly increasing the ad revenue the company receives. If that’s not something you can stomach, leave. If you don’t care, stick around, not much will change. Up to you. The author of the post is in the former group.

My timeline has just been all about Musk, I hide posts and so on but it's no use. He wants to be the main character and people are giving him attention. It's annoying and I have not that much interest in it.

People hate on Mastodon but there you can actually find insightful content with hashtags and see what you want, I spent a good amount of time curating my twitter TL but I don't see much use in going there right now. I don't preach to just migrate to mastodon or other places but Twitter seems like it has run its course, for me at least, I hope it improves since there used to be a lot of great content from developers once you block/mute people playing the algorithm.

Additionally I'm getting DM requests all the time from bots, today alone I got 3, I don't understand what's happened.

So having a self avowed Neo-Nazi invited back into the room, who cannot be reported, is “virtually no difference”?

The ads I get are definitely junkier, but I think they've been getting worse over time, rather than one quick lurch.

I think it's probably pretty dependent on who you follow and how you interact. I'm not tweeting anymore, but still have my account (I harbour some vague hope that it'll eventually do a Tumblr and get resold to some more competent steward). My timeline has gone pretty quiet, and pretty meta (a lot of it is _about_ Twitter). There's a lot more random crap suggested than there used to be; I'd say at least two thirds of my feed is suggestions or "[someone] liked". Until I blocked him, Elon tweets were inescapable (I'd never followed him, but til recently he never made frequent enough appearances on my timeline that I felt the need to block him). The ads have gone very gambling and crypto-oriented (though, interestingly, right now they're not appearing at all).

All in all, it is not what is was; on the contrary Mastodon has gone from a ghost town to having most of the stuff I liked from Twitter; in many ways it's the Twitter of 15 years ago, and that's largely a good thing.

It was far from perfect, but there were many people there who cared and was working to make it a better place for everyone. Musk throw all those efforts out of the windows, brought conspiracy theories front and center, let banned people for violating Twitter's own rules get back, etc. There's no hope of improvement anymore.

> It was always something of a cesspool, and was a vehicle for political extremism of all shades.

Exactly. They should have left years ago since Twitter has always been an outrage machine and a bot laden cesspool riddled with CP spreading on the site. Still, many refused and tolerated the peak outrage for decades with no change.

Those who want more extreme content like that are free to go to their own federated echo chambers if they want to. Just not on Twitter anymore.

That's true when it's a high cost move like leaving the US if the other party wins the election. I've heard D's and R's both say that and they never do of course. But this is a pretty cheap move.

I managed to stay away from Instagram and Facebook for +3 years, so I guess that's feasible.

If I wanted Facebook, I'd stay on Facebook.

It's funny, I've never seen a whiff of CP on Twitter. How hard do progressives search for it? I guess I just don't want it badly enough.