Refusing to Use Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Refusing to Use Twitter

blog.korny.info

85 pointspavel_lishin31 comments

I've never liked Twitter, and I wish everyone using it would post their content on a free software platform that wasn't managed by one private company. I felt exactly the same way in the 2010s and early 2020s - the period of time this person describes as "amazing" - when the Twitter platform was owned and managed by a different group of people with object-level poltical opinions he liked better.

Nonetheless, insofar as people who post content I want to read on Twitter, or the ActivityPub ecosystem, or the AT protocol ecosystem, I'll do my best to read it where it's posted. The ActivityPub ecosystem has serious flaws and so does AT proto, but they're at least free software projects that people can hack on to try to make them better (although of course in any kind of distributed system, the hard part isn't making your changes it's getting a critical mass of other nodes to agree to them)

Stopped only now? I cleared my tweets the day it fell into Handsome Musk's claws and left a note explaining not wanting to support that dubious guy with a link to my Mastodon account. Never looked back.

Likewise except for the mastodon account. I simply stopped using that kind of medium.

I get so much out of Mastodon these days, it's great. Just added @korny to my list.

Why is this flagged?

Because there are basically no checks in flagging, and awful bad suppressing ne'er do-wellers detest the good & people hearing of good.

I follow a lot of japanese accounts on Twitter. Idols, vtubers, actors, sport teams, sumo news, pro mahjong scene, artists, mangaka, streamers, goverment agencies etc. They don't use anything else but Twitter, maybe Facebook. I can move away but what I _want to_ follow is still there.

Maybe we need regional microblogging services so people would be incentivized to use them, maybe China was right all along

Xcancel with a Chrome extension (I vibed my own) works pretty well.

There's also this: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/xcancelcom-redirect...

Those are four solid reasons to leave Twitter. There's many more reasons.

I quit my Twitter account pretty much around the time Musk took it over (he became a more of a looney around the time he had contact with Putin in end of 2022), haven't looked back. I added the ASNs to my firewall, this was before they went with Cloudflare. There are some proxies which allow you to quote from there, but a lot of people are now dual stack (e.g. Twitter + BlueSky or Twitter + Mastodon). So for example following the latest concerning Ukraine is still very much possible without Twitter.

From what I heard, it is pretty much 4chan level nowadays.

I still use RSS and Mastodon.

Not reading the sources that extreme ideologues read is to lack critical information and perspective important to understanding those who you dissagree with or even find reprehensible.

I think the bar analogy lacks some important nuance. Not participating on the platform is one thing but drawing a distinction between being informed and support for the platform needs a little more thought here.

IMO social media is not a type of source I have to participate in order to get information. I can read the far right’s opinion though actual sources and news aggregators without Twitter at all.

To continue the analogy, I need not go to a Nazi bar to read the headlines of the local newspaper to see what the latest propaganda is.

I agree that participation is not nessecary as I mentioned. But I find the way people comment and the back and forth on twitter interesting data. From the raw feelings or nation state bots pushing certain narratives, I personally find it informative viewing the platform where these interactions happen beyond divorced headlines.

95% of it is garbage, but as a member of a targeted class of people I like to see what angles they are coming for us from way ahead of time.

Do any of these people righteously quitting xtwitter not know you can avoid the algorithms and just follow who you want?

I follow a few game development companies, quite a few language developers (go, rescript, etc), a few news reporters (left and right), an account that posts old maps, Dionne Warwick (no idea why). That's it. What's with all the drama???

The thinking goes that you're supporting right-wing white nationalist values, boosting of misinformation, and censorship by using it and, thus, supporting the platform.

go back to reddit

OT but I'll include my usual rant.

I hate these socials. While some posts here and there are interesting, I'll still have to read people's thoughts on politics, what they ate for lunch or how was their vacation in Vietnam. I wish you could only read the authors you follow on the topics you care, but the algorithms don't work like that, and they post about anything.

On the other hand, more in-topic focused boards like HN and Reddit, value short-term visibility over depth. Sure, at least you're only discussing one topic at a time, but how much insights or reflections can you have when discussions die in 24 hours?

Say what you want, but good old vBulletin-like forums are peak internet discussions.

Like how in the world can you compete for insightful-deep topic discussions with something like a plain old forum?

Where in the world can you find so much information, e.g. about the Mercedes W211 E class?

https://mbworld.org/forums/e-class-w211-20/

I with there were places to discuss, e.g., a specific technology (sometimes github issues are a surrogate), or software design philosophy in general (the mail group of Jon Ousterhout is again, just a surrogate).

But these places just don't exist.

Even more at work, companies would benefit from having long term discussions and threads about product, technologies, etc. Instead we spreading (and forgetting) the same information over and over with teams, slack, jira, issues, conflunce, sync-calls. ugh

I've stopped using Twitter too. I don't even browse it.

I left a year ago and pulled down all my content.

It was definitely a good move.

The original saying was "Twitter is free because you pay with your mental health".

Also stopped using Twitter/X. Immediate mental health++. I was afraid I was losing access to the "pulse" of ML/AI, but the opposite actually happened when I replaced a Twitter feed of shallow AI takes with Huggingface's Daily Papers email list [1].