Leaving Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Leaving Twitter

ben-evans.com

73 pointscdme89 comments

I'm trying to acknowledge my bias in that a) I still use Twitter, and b) I don't really see it as demonstrably different in any way than it was a year or two or four ago, with the exception of a lot of people complaining about it being SO much worse.

So with that being said, what is unique about Twitter in that so many people feel the need to announce their departure like this? I stopped using Twitter for years in the mid-10s after 4-5 years of daily usage and certainly didn't write a blog post about it, and I started my freelancing career there. I've gotten jobs and met IRL friends on Twitter, it was an important part of my life especially ca. 2009-2012 or so.

This guy is a professional opinion haver (aka analyst/journalist) which is why we get his opinion about it. Have there been many others because this one’s the first I’ve read and seems well thought out?

I too left Twitter but just resurrected my Mastodon account and got on with life.

Some people (speaking as one) like to speak self-righteously about decisions they make. "I think everyone else should do what I do." Seeing that in writing, it sounds ignorant and foolish; how unimaginative to think that everyone else, if they even exist, has the same preferences and ways of interacting with others.

To counter this impulse and recognize what I'm feeling so I can better decide what to do, I journal and meditate and go on observational walks, something everyone should of course be doing. Wink.

> I stopped using Twitter for years in the mid-10s after 4-5 years of daily usage and certainly didn't write a blog post about it, and I started my freelancing career there.

How many Twitter followers did you have, and how many people would read your blog post?

Evans has 389,000 Twitter followers, so his departure does have some salience to people other than himself.

My experience with Twitter was also mostly unchanged, I left because I choose not to support the new ownership.

It's a classic example of "Then they came for _ and I did not speak out because I was not a _ ..."

Leaving Twitter is how I can speak out, in my small way.

This person had 400k followers, so presumably felt the need to say something, rather than just vanish. Seems reasonable enough?

Everyone I knew on Twitter moved to Mastodon, Bluesky, or Cohost. Some of them still post sporadically, but it's clear they want people to move over by the URL that's replaced/joined most of their display names.

> But I was on Twitter since 2007, and built a meaningful part of my career on it, and I won’t be posting at all, for the foreseeable future

Commit and delete your account then. Folks love to complain but rarely follow through.

> Folks love to complain but rarely follow through.

Traffic down 14%-19% (depending on source) in the last year indicates people are following through.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/twitter-traffic-on-downward-trend...

I mean the lot that complains publicly often does not follow through.

I deleted my circa 2009 account earlier this year. It was fun while it lasted, just like MySpace.

Would love to see a graph going back over the past decade. Otherwise how can you tell if there are multiyear cycles in Twitter's engagement or if the trend had begun long before Musk's takeover?

Would also need to see an analysis of other social media sites to see how their engagement has fared in the same timeframe to tell if it's a broader trend or Twitter specifically.

> Otherwise how can you tell if there are multiyear cycles in Twitter's engagement or if the trend had begun long before Musk's takeover?

If you have access to SimilarWeb (where the data came from) you can see it's a new trend. I can't share that but they do a free trial if you want to check it out.

> Commit and delete your account then. Folks love to complain but rarely follow through.

The account is now locked. But deleting your account leaves it open for trolls to take over the username and pretend to be you.

> But deleting your account leaves it open for trolls to take over the username and pretend to be you

Another unfortunate new policy is that inactive accounts will also be severed eventually and up for grabs.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-says-its-purging-inact...

At this point, I find the constant stream of people complaining about Twitter and posting long-winded goodbye speeches much more annoying than the supposed changes of the service under Musk.

> supposed changes

Hasn’t Musk and others at Twitter/X said that they HAVE made changes? What’s the ‘supposed’ here relating to?

I think it relates to the fact that very few of these changes affect users directly, especially if you make it a point not to follow political hacks on either side of the aisle. My timeline has never had politicians or celebrities in it, I follow well over a thousand active accounts, and my feed is indistinguishable from what it was half a decade ago.

I’m baffled by this; how are you using Twitter? As far as I can see, the replies under _practically everything_ are full of spam from idiot blueticks; this seems like a pretty dramatic change.

I think it depends on what accounts you read: If I only look at replies to accounts that I followed prior to Musk's takeover, then not much has changed. But that is likely because I only followed niche accounts. The moment I look at more popular accounts (news or what have you), then I see an overweight of blue-tick accounts that rarely have anything worthwhile to contribute

>are full of spam from idiot blueticks

Was always the case.

Prior to the ascension of Naughty Old Mr Car, bluetick replies weren't promoted to the front. (There were also fewer blueticks, and most though not all were less attention-seeking than the current crop).

Those people are expressing grief. Twitter was one thing, and has changed into a substantially different thing. Something that has been a meaningful part of their lives for, in many cases, well over a decade.

If you care about those people, compassion might be helpful, no matter how you feel about the actual changes. If you don't care about them - which is perfectly valid, we can't care about the entire Internet - I suggest just not engaging on those posts. It's kinder to them and you.

Perhaps it's profoundly unhealthy that Twitter changing its TOS or Musk unbanning some people and banning others causes you to grieve.

I'm not saying the correct response is "LOL STFU" (it's not), but I also don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with saying someone is treating something as more than it actually is.

If we untie this from Musk for a moment: Twitter's user composition has changed tremendously over the last 12 months, whatever the reasons. That means for a lot of people, folks that they'd gotten to know quite closely suddenly aren't there any more.

It's not grief as the same level as "my close relative died", but it's grief on the level of "All my friends left and moved elsewhere". That's still a major upset, and people need to process. And the technical term for that processing is "grieve". That is entirely independent of your opinions on how to treat it, it's a feeling folks experience.

And, given those are folks who like leaving a somewhat public life, they process in public. If those emotions don't resonate with you, it's probably a good idea to just move on and let others feel what they need to feel.

> Perhaps it's profoundly unhealthy that Twitter changing its TOS or Musk unbanning some people and banning others causes you to grieve.

Why? People grieve all sorts of things—a community which was built up over a decade and is now falling apart seems a perfectly reasonable thing to grieve. What about that do you feel is profoundly unhealthy?

I agree with you, it's clear that they're talking about something that's coming from a place of rather ordinary human empathy, as opposed to unhealthy fixation.

What's falling apart though? Is it really falling apart? Like I said, my feed is identical. I think if you dig into this you'll find it's a completely self-made issue. People leave because they think there's going to be massive changes or they try to prove some political point. Then other people are mad because some people left and start talking about how Twitter is completely changed when it hasn't.

> Like I said, my feed is identical.

I believe you, but my feed definitely isn't. Lots of the commercial feeds are still there, but most of my friends have moved on—not all to the same place—and the more interesting feeds I follow tend to post someplace else first, and then crosspost to Twitter.

> start talking about how Twitter is completely changed when it hasn't

This is very much a YMMV situation.

> I believe you, but my feed definitely isn't

Yeah, I think the people who haven't perceived the difference are very lucky and seem to be in the minority.

Yep, Twitter is not an airport, you do not need to announce your departure, just leave... Most people will likely not even notice, and I think that is real reason they post these things, main character syndrome, they need people the notice they are leaving, if no one notices then their self worth declines.

Sad really

My personal favorite trope as of late is announcing you're leaving for BlueSky, because Twitter is reputedly inhospitable.

Then returning 5 days later as if nothing happened, Costanza-style, because your narcissism can't cope with a mere 14 followers to look at pictures you posted of your breakfast.

For myself:

I've been really happy moving over to Mastodon honestly. It's been a breath of fresh air.

Does it have free speech?

It does not in any way.

For those who want it; there are instances which don’t really defederate at all. If you’re into weird Nazis, they’re absolutely available.

Most people, realistically, want some moderation in their social media, and the major instances cater to that.

I never get these type of articles, if you don’t like X (no, I mean as a variable, not twitter, goddamit Elon!), just don’t use it. Social media been and still the worst type of interaction you will get on the internet, that’s why I barely use any and I have a healthy mindset, I do join and be part of other communities that I can relate to in my field, your discussion will be mostly focused on your and their interests, sure you might argue about stuff, but it’s still within one goal and interest, social media on the other hand, is everything bad in society will be surfacing and shoved into your face.

I'm uncertain how these types of posts are supposed to be taken seriously. Is it normal for people to make a big deal about their personal decision to stop frequenting a particular restaurant or store (or website)?

> Is it normal for people to make a big deal about their personal decision to stop frequenting a particular restaurant

It's extremely common for people to complain when a restaurant they frequented and enjoyed turns for the worse, yes.

when I'm screwed by some business I'll tell anybody who will listen and I hold the grudge for years lmao

> I was on Twitter since 2007, and built a meaningful part of my career on it, and I won’t be posting at all, for the foreseeable future, because I think it does matter.

If you’re someone active in your community and always there and suddenly you stopped, do you think people would notice?

They do. If they search for you and find this, it’s telling them you’re okay, just not there anymore, and why.

If you don’t care. That’s fine. To the people that do care, this explains why.

If that restaurant has a lot of regulars that you interact every day, it is reasonable to say "Good bye, I am not coming back".

Yes, actually.

He has 389,000 Twitter followers. It's not the same thing.

wait until you hear about Leaving New York essays

Businesses are leaving because twitter is increasingly about culture wars and the risk of brand damage is too high.

Twitter will soon have multiple pricing tiers and I suspect they will get more aggressive by limiting functionality for non-paying users.

I stopped using Twitter in 2016 when they started their policy of applying the platform rules differently depending on your real-world community status. Nope.

You know what?

I'm still alive and I couldn't care less about the Musk takeover.

https://warpcast.com/ is the best alternative yet

I know it's an unpopular opinion but hear me out:

1) Now the lists are prominent feature, pick accounts that specialise and put them in lists. I find it especially useful if I want to keep an eye on stuff that I don't necessarily want to engage everyday. For example, I have a list of conspiracy theorists and misogynist who are quite influential but I can't stand to see their BS all the time. I also have a list of economists that I would like to be able to glance over when there's some developments.

2) Community notes, which was developed as "birdwatch" pre-takeover but never released, is actually super useful.

3) Seeing the number of views is very interesting to have an idea about the reach of something. It's probably very inaccurate considering what constitutes a view but its useful to compare one content to another

4) Removing the headlines of link previews makes you click it before forming an opinion. IMHO headlines are harmful.

5) I love that Musk was exposed as free speech NIMBY. His position is now cemented, can no longer claim being free speech absolutist and be takes seriously.

6) And the Nazi stuff that Evans mentions, IMHO is harmless because it's challenged. I'm much more free speech absolutists than Musk and I don't believe that de-platforming people, making them congregate in specialised platforms helps anybody. They just get crazier and crazier and then shoot people or conspire to do things. It's much better when this happens in open and they BS is called out.

I don't know if Twitter pushes that many nutjobs to everyone or I end up seeing so many because I have a list full of them but I think it's important to be exposed to all kind of trends in the society - even though some of those are extremely unpleasant. Every now and then, they have a point or they are the only ones that address a pain point of concern and can get lot's of supporters when that happen. If you keep eye on these issues you can act before its too late.

And if some those people actually attempt do something harmful, that's the law enforcements job to take care of it.

Maybe it's bad business but it's a better product and I don't see any point of leaving it. A cesspool you don't see doesn't seize existing. An anti-vaxxer trend, for example, will end up effecting you even if you don't have a Twitter account because there are people actively working for it and leaving a platform will simply make their job easier.

> 4) Removing the headlines of link previews makes you click it before forming an opinion. IMHO headlines are harmful.

This doesn't make any sense. If I click it, I see the headline. Why is the context of a picture any better than the context of a headline + picture?

Musk was transparent about this - he only cared about the aesthetics.

You already made an effort to open the article, you might end up check out what it is all about. It might be about aesthetics but IMHO has an effect of actually displaying the articles. Musk can't plan for everything.

> You already made an effort to open the article, you might end up check out what it is all about.

No, I'm never, ever clicking on a blind link of an image. Might as well give a hint what I'm clicking.

I click. How else I'm supposed to know what's this all about? When there were headlines, I "knew" without clicking anything.

I doubt you're clicking every blind link image. Who has that kind of time?

Consider this on any other site. Consider HackerNews where there's no headline and just a random image: it makes no sense.

I think you're just giving Musk a lot of passes.

I click all the times when the discussion seems interesting or I would like to know why that person says what he/she says.

HN without headlines are Image boards like 4Chan, I guess. Those boards are very engaging and people commenting tend to to have an idea about the stuff they post about - albeit in 4Chan's case a lot of the times can be toxic. Despite the notoriety of the communities of these website, the format seems to have some benefits.

> HN without headlines are Image boards like 4Chan, I guess

Even image boards have a space with text to explain what's happening, what you're clicking on.

Again: sell me on how less context is better than more.

>Again: sell me on how less context is better than more.

When the context is not enough, you well seek to expand it. The problem with headlines is that they wrongly give you the impression of having enough context.

"if we show less information maybe people will be curious and click (and get the same information)" isn't passing a logic smell test.

I think the ulterior motive was to reduce clicking away.

I don't know about it, I can't read minds.

Nor can I, which is why I wrote "I think."

And I think that because it passes the logic test that mystery box clicking does not.

2) Community notes (birdwatch) was already released before Elon Musk took over. Elon just changed the name and maybe sped up the availability of it that's all.

3) Reply and retweet numbers already gave a pretty good idea of how much a post was popular compared to others. Having also the view count would be welcome but the algorithm on how a view is counted is not clear and the numbers seem inflated, so in its current state I am not sure if it is actually helpful, other than showing ad providers some inflated numbers.

4) The text of the tweet itself acts like the headline now, which is even worse than having the headline. Also when you click on the image, it takes you to the page where you see the headline first anyway. So I don't see how removing the headlines helped anything. In my opinion it just made it confusing to differentiate images from links.

The release timing of birdwatch is unimportant, it wasn't available for my region. Great feature anyway and Twitter is better now, I don't really care who takes the credit for it.

Anyway, I don't know why one wouldn't click an article in a tweet to see what's all about but fine - maybe doesn't work the same for everyone. AFAIK We don't have other option than sticking to anecdotes and personal experience since no credible study was made on it.

I always click on articles if I can't form my opinion from a headline. No, the person posting the article doesn't count because I click the article to check out why this person says this thing.

Boosting some accounts and "deboosting" others. Disappearing likes. Yeah, all cool features, free speech absolutism at its best.

> "The last year swapped stasis for chaos. Stuff breaks at random and you don’t know if it’s a bug or a decision."

For a couple of months, yes, but why is he using the present tense?

> "The advertisers have fled"

I whish! There are still to many ads in my timeline

> "and no-one knows what will be broken by accident or on purpose tomorrow. The example that’s closest to home for me was that the in-house newsletter product was shut down"

uh? newsletter product? I don´t care if there is a bug from time to time, what is he expecting?

> "Meanwhile, beyond the chaos, there has been no sense for the actual users of where we’re going. What should those newly hard-core engineers be shipping? A ‘super app’? A universal content platform with no external links? Your financial life? Seriously?"

At this point I has to double check if by "being on Twitter since 2007" meant he worked there, but no, he has never worked at Twitter, he is just talking about opening a free account. And yet I writes "where we’re going" as he and Twitter where one. Maybe it was a copy/paste mistake or a typo.... or maybe he is delusional.

> "And then, there are the Nazis."

His definition of Nazi is probably VERY encompassing but still, what the heck is he smoking?

I also have a Twitter account since 2007, and in the first few years it made a huge difference in my personal and professional life. Although I remember those years as "peak" Twitter, current Twitter is good enough and MUCH better that the stinking toxic pile it was between 2014-2022... I don´t get the hate

> There are still to many ads in my timeline

Yeah, but they're for dropshipping companies called Flgahzx.

I wonder how low the ad rates have gotten.

Same, but also more mainstream ones where the promoted tweet is from a year ago - I wonder if they're repromoting completing campaigns to boost the stats?

> For a couple of months, yes, but why is he using the present tense?

Go to Slack’s status twitter, and it shows you three incidents from the last four years, not even in order. Go to some other twitter accounts, and it redirects you to a login screen. I mean, this all feels pretty broken; maybe it’s intentional and the product person is just an idiot, but really, who knows. Go to https://status.twitter.com, and you get a cert error. Accept the invalid cert, and you get _redirected to another status page with a different, also incorrect, cert_. And so on. It’s still pretty broken.

As yet another Twitter-account-since-2007 people, I’m gone. For now I’m keeping a dormant account on the basis that he might get bored and go back to the imaginary car tunnels, and Twitter sold off to someone more sensible (presumably Automattic, inheritor of all washed-up social networks), but Naughty Old Mr Car’s wacky world is not for me.

This piece boils down to "I was with Musk all the way, until he touched my pet topic on which I only tolerate my kind of disinfo".

I don't even use Xitter, but I hate what Musk is doing to a once great company. But maybe you are OK with more hate speech and disinformation.

Oh no, I've not really used Twitter for a long time - even before Musk took over, it was a cesspit.

What I find hypocritical is people reacting only to their pet-topics, on which they're themselves happy to spread disinfo (the Corbyn jibes) - because it has to be the right disinfo "or else".

> And then, there’s Elon.

> I once called Elon Musk ‘a bullshitter who delivers’ - he says a lot of stuff, and yet, there are the cars and the self-landing rockets. People generally struggle with one or other of these - they will refuse to accept the problem in selling a car that can’t drive itself as ‘full self driving’, or they will say ‘he didn’t found Tesla!’, forgetting that he’s run it for the last 15 years. Most of what you see at Tesla or SpaceX really is his creation - but half of what he says is bullshit.

> Until recently, though, the bullshit was mostly about cars or tunnels. It wasn’t repeating obvious anti-semitic dog-whistles. It wasn’t telling us that George Soros is plotting to destroy western civilisation. It wasn’t engaging with and promoting white suprematists. It wasn’t, as this week, telling us all to read a very obvious misinformation account, with a record of anti-semitism, as the best source on Israel. Of course, it had bought a Blue Tick.

...

> If you see a man claim that he’ll have ‘full self-driving’ working ‘next year’ for half a decade and can’t make fun of that just a little, you are probably blinding yourself too, but it does’t matter much. And maybe you don’t care much about this, or have decided not to see it. But I was on Twitter since 2007, and built a meaningful part of my career on it, and I won’t be posting at all, for the foreseeable future, because I think it does matter.

I didn't really like reading this bit. I don't know where it comes from but Elon has accomplished a great deal, and I am no Elon fanboi

I'm glad that Evans has a "final straw", but I find it strange that the last week, which he mentions a couple times in the article, was the final straw for him:

> We saw this at its logical conclusion in the last week, with deliberate misinformation promoted

> It wasn’t, as this week, telling us all to read a very obvious misinformation account

This kind of thing has been happening ever since Musk took over Twitter. For example, a year ago: "Elon Musk, new owner of Twitter, tweets unfounded, anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi attack" https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/30/elon-musk-new-owner-of-twitt...

And while Musk did eventually delete the tweet, he was still unrepentent: "This is fake – I did not tweet out a link to The New York Times!" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586871691686223872

So there's nothing new happening now that wasn't happening all along, the past year, except perhaps that Musk has started tweeting about something that Evans personally cares about.

And sometimes that's all it takes: tripping over that topic you know a lot about and realizing that if they're that wrong about this, maybe they're that wrong period.

Call it "reverse Gell-Mann amnesia effect."

Elon is not twitter, he is sometimes a troll. Have you removed the troll from your own eye?

Elon gets his posts artificially boosted by The Algorithm, and he plans to remove the block feature, because "It doesn't make sense". Also, Xitter apparently puts more hateful shit onto people's "For You" feeds now.

I'm not a Twitter user so if this is a dumb question I apologize.

This sounds like a pretty serious allegation. How do you know this is true? Is it in the source code?[1]

[1]: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm

This was well reported on in February.

https://fortune.com/2023/02/15/elon-musk-tweets-boost-joe-bi...

Thanks, the article is paywalled so I can't read it, but from what I can see it does say "reportedly." How credible is the report? Like is it from anonymous disgruntled employees or is there some independent data the journalists were able to collect?

Also was this like a one time stupid thing Elon did and then reversed (which seems like something he tends to do from time to time), or is it a permanent/semi-permanent ongoing thing? GP's claim is that it's ongoing part of the algorithm. A one-time thing is definitely bad and gross, but is a much lesser allegation than an ongoing thing, especially if it's part of the Algorithm but isn't part of the open source part that they claim.

This article went into a bit more detail: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/15/elon-musk...

And this seems to be the original report: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...

It does sound like anonymous "sources" which could be disgruntled employees or former employees, but overall I get the feeling it's legitimate and GP's assertion is correct to what degree, hard to say, but it does seem true

It’s been kind of fascinating to me what peoples’ last straw is. For me, it was the purging of the journalists back in November, and if it hadn’t been that, I’d certainly have been out the door when third-party clients died. But it is somewhat amazing to me that Musk is _still_ finding new cohorts of people to piss off (the promotion of that account was pretty egregious, but I’d have expected the people it would annoy had mostly left about 20 egregious incidents ago…)

twitter is not an airport - no need to announce arrivals or departures.

He has VIP tickets and probably a cool hat

> no need to announce arrivals or departures.

Similarly, no need to walk around telling other people it's not an airport.

It started off well. I thought this idea was insightful:

"This is often the real challenge to tech incumbents: once the network effects are locked in, it’s very hard to get people to switch to something that’s roughly the same but 10% better - they switch to something that solves one underlying need in an entirely new way."

Then it devolved into a rant about Nazis.

Fine, leave a completely not vital (nor important, IMO) platform and be done with it. Can we discuss something else already?

> Can we discuss something else already?

I'm curious why you read this and then commented on it if that's really your opinion.

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