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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

My sense is that Twitter’s fall was an opportunity for a lot of people to just drop out. I know for me it’s become a very occasional thing and neither Bluesky nor Mastodon ever achieved critical mass. As far as I’m concerned the format is largely done.

Never engaged with the political stuff.

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> My sense is that Twitter’s fall was an opportunity for a lot of people to just drop out.

Yeah, that was the case for me. I used Twitter quite a bit from about 2012 through 2020, but I was already phasing it out when the takeover happened, so it was an easy call to just close my account. While I do have an IG and Bsky account, I rarely use them. So Twitter's death basically meant the end of my mainstream social media usage.

Yeah I cut it by accident during the pandemic. It already sucked then - person you follow liked this is what did me in. Elon just finished it off.

I suspended my account, without realising if I left it for n days it would be deleted. Went back one day and there was someone else with my handle. Actually felt relieved as the whole thing was gone. Didn’t get a chance to worry about an archive.

Same. Thanks Elon!

It wasn't without consequences though. I'd made some IRL connections through twitter that I thought would last for years - they migrated to bluesky and IG but I didn't. Suddenly they were not interested in speaking with me.

Lose your clout, don't be surprised if you get shunned by the clout obsessed.

And you all made place for guys like me; I don’t get booed away by 90% of the users anymore when engaging in discussion, more often I get an actual discussion out of it. Before that it was just a highly toxic “noo my opinion is the right one and I’m rigid on that and you’re an idiot” ambience.

Funny how things shift like that. Also never engaged with political stuff.

Whatever works for you personally I find there is no longer a critical mass of professional peers to engage with so I’ve mostly reluctantly just dropped it.

The irony of the toxicity of your comments to ghaff is amazing. You know nothing about him, but made him the villain in your story.

I didn't mean to correlate the guy I'm replying to with the people I was describing, and I apologize if it seemed that way.

What does "ghaff" mean? I can't find a definition. I'm not a native English person.

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