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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

A non-technological way to give negative feedback to Twitter/X is to stop using it, even "just reading an occasional post".

Continuing to read things on it, even through Nitter, is in the interests of Twitter/X and of the people who continue to support Twitter/X by posting there.

Tell the people who use it no. The decent people won't hear them on Twitter/X, and the decent people will wonder what's wrong with them if they persist in supporting that thing.

Tech industry circles nowadays are sometimes tinged with individualist selfish "take whatever you can" thinking, and anarchic or even underhanded methods. Including the thinking "an express no doesn't mean no, if i can find a way to take it from them anyway."

Grassroots collective social action can work, if it isn't constantly undermined by selfish and short-sighted taking.

View on HN

I agree with everything you said and abandoned my Twitter account and everything on it years ago for these reasons.

Everything, except for your usage of anarchism to imply chaos or disorder, which is a common misunderstanding. Anarchism, particularly the flavor I subscribe to which is Social Anarchism, is a pursuit of social order, freedom, and prosperity without centralized authorities like Musk.

Thank you for saying this. I totally agree with the OPs comment, but the use of anarchism is off. In fact collectivist anarchism is likely to improve the situation and at least, in theory, produce less predatory entities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivist_anarchism

I'm fond of the communalism of Murray Bookchin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communalism_(Bookchin)

their ideas of liberatory technology and post-scarcity anarchism are refreshing

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lewis-herber-murray-...

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post...

plus the Kurds & co evolved their own system from the "libertarian municipalism" Bookchin described

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_confederalism

Thank you for the pointers! These look very interesting.

Anarchism is questioning authority for authority sake. If you put yourself in the place of authority to tell other people what's anarchism you are in for a bad time.

The disagreement is the key value of anarchism. The dialectical pendulum, the exchange of ideas. Disagreeing is expressing anarchism, even if you disagree with the other party's understanding of anarchism.

My explanation is in line with the community maintained Wikipedia articles and their sources based on a long history of anarchist history and writings, and none of it seems to be under any significant dispute.

One does not need to be in a position of authority above others to help ensure discussions are grounded in common definitions of what words mean.

The irony of you pulling credentials to illustrate how right you are about anarchism tells how much you don't understand it even if you understand the definition of the word. Anarchy is negative self-referential, you can't really define it universally without creating a paradox. For instance, even in this case that I might be right in explaining this to you, I'm wrong if I say this is anarchism categorically.

What credentials? I just pointed to supporting evidence I used the word in the way it is most commonly and publicly defined.

Meanwhile you shared your own meaning as correct with no supporting evidence it is a definition commonly shared.

You are free to make up your own special definitions of words that few if any share if you like. You can use the word cat to refer to a dog, for instance. It is not going to help you communicate with the majority of people who speak a mostly shared dialect of written english where words have well documented common knowledge meanings though, but you do you.

Neither making up words nor shoving their definitions in people's faces will help neither of us communicate with anyone else. These types of conversations have to happen in good faith where you assume the other party isn't a moron and conduct a productive conversation, like this one.

The fact you address little to none of my points is an indicative that while you are a very good thesaurus, you don't understand much hermeneutics.

So in good faith I went to dig a bit what's the holdout in our debate here, and it's because I didn't understand two separate uses of anarchism, the one that's epistemological, anarchism as anti-foundationalism, my point, and your point that's political. In political anarchism we don't have this pressure to question every single thing, so when you said Socialist Anarchism I should have gone and read what that is had I known this distinction beforehand.

TLDR, you are right and I'm not necessarily wrong, we were just talking about two different things.

> I should have gone and read what that is

That is the most capacity for growth I have seen demonstrated in a while. You just gave me slightly more hope in humanity.

I just wish I had a less aggressive or snarky style of writing. Maybe then I'd invite people for a discussion and not for exchanging heartbreak, but we are products of our context and certainty is what's currently rewarded, not doubt.

> I just wish I had a less aggressive or snarky style of writing.

You and me both. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard variations of "you are way less of an asshole in person"

Complex asynchronous communication always has a way of forcing the temperature higher than it needs to be because we have more time to wordsmith and the cost of feeling stupid can be multiplied by the size of the perceived audience.

Often the same two people would have had a much better interaction in person where each sees the other as a human being speaking with their own voice and facial expressions.

indeed, the context here is political/organisational rather than epistemological

anarchist organisational practices are real

people have been creating solutions to counter "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" for many decades now

coarsely put, anarchists (and work/housing co-ops, and protest groups) most generally favour consensus-process with proper anti-slow facilitation and role rotation, vs the [usually] majority voting systems and power dichotomies that are the style of communism (see democratic centeralism)

though many places just don't mention this essentially counts as anarchism (or libertarian socialism), cos a) the stigma, b) they just don't need to or know to, c) they do, just behind closed doors

"horizontalism/horizontalidad" has been a good descriptor

https://www.seedsforchange.org.uk/guides

https://www.radicalroutes.org.uk/structure-and-governance

see also sociocracy, and Murray Bookchin

and the whole range of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism plus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_communism in general

libertarian socialism is an oxymoron

Not necessarily I think, because socialism need not be authoritarian, I don't know how, maybe in a thousand years when the society collectively reached higher levels of moral development. But my intuition is that for libertarian socialism to exist, people need to agree and desire to converge to a golden mean ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_mean_(philosophy) ) instead of being incentivised to accumulate as much wealth and power as possible.

> socialism need not be authoritarian

True socialism is the opposite of authoritarianism. Simply put, it's taking care of everyone. Just because the label has been misused doesn't change the goal of those of us who identify as socialists. USA propaganda made it a bad word.

> As one of the main ideologies on the political spectrum, socialism is the standard left-wing ideology in most countries. [0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

True! But at some point the rubber needs to meet the road and we haven't seen this materialize in practice, so for all intents and purposes, when we talk about realist socialism we need to account for the various forms of authoritarianism that comes in the package, I think

shouldn't we, by the same account, maybe even more, be disparaging of capitalism?

I don't know, I don't care about capitalism, I prefer to reserve my attention for things that could work long term and let it wither and die.

Having said that, I don't subscribe to capitalist propaganda. When I say realist socialism that should refer to the inherent structures of power that need to exist in order to organize large groups of people and how to manage greed and ambition so it doesn't eat society from within. It's important to idealise true socialism, but just as much as the Ubermensch can't materialize, that is also just a compass, a guiding star.

did Pinochet make libertarian capitalism an oxymoron?

In Orwell's 1984, control of the language was central to control of society. Newspeak and such.

Consider recent quibbles over pronouns.

Given Orwell's strong endorsement of anarchists, it's unlikely he's lampooning anarchists in 1984...

You mean quibbles over how my loved-ones live life? It's not difficult. Just be respectful to someone and that's the end of it affecting you.

One thing, I meant "Anarchism is questioning authority for authority sake" that's one single thing.

Your disagreement here is not the typical understanding. And correcting people is not pushing hierarchy. The parent poster isn't standing over you, they are standing beside you offering to educate you.

You can call anarchism whatever you want, just... if you invent your own notion of the thing don't be surprised when no one understands you.

Edit: I see your post much deeper on, you can ignore me.

No, sorry. Political activists do not get to decide for everyone else what words mean.

Everyone gets to decide what words mean. But anarchism has lots and lots of history of scholarship, debate, and discussion. Kropotkin was writing about this in the 1800s, and we've had well over a century of defining and shaping the definitions.

The parent poster isn't inventing anything or deciding anything. They're just sharing what the common understandings are.

If colloquial usage of "anarchy" has a different definition than, an, I'm sorry, irrelevant niche political movement, then you should assume a given speaker meant the colloquial form.

> The parent poster isn't inventing anything or deciding anything.

Stating something authoritatively is, in fact, "deciding" it for others.

> They're just sharing what the common understandings are.

No, it is not at all the common understanding. When I put "anarchy" into a search engine, the first thing I see is "Absence of any form of political authority.", because that is the common understanding. Forming an "-ism" around that is commonly understood to follow the usual patterns.

Perhaps people who apply the label to themselves wish to see things that way, but they are (thankfully) a small minority of people.

I don't give a damn about the justification, because there's clearly no good reason to care, as it clearly serves a dishonest and dangerous political purpose, viz: attempting to delegitimize the state in order to seize power.

> Tech industry circles nowadays are sometimes tinged with individualist selfish "take whatever you can" thinking, and anarchic or even underhanded methods. Including the thinking "an express no doesn't mean no, if i can find a way to take it from them anyway"

I agree with that though. It's better to circumvent than to submit and do what you're told.

The same way piracy keeps streaming services somewhat honest, I'm sure that if piracy didn't exist, subscriptions would be even pricier.

The piracy thing is a bit backwards I think. Piracy is a consequence of subscription price so higher prices induce more piracy. The only way piracy doesn’t exist is if all content is free to begin with

And the reason that piracy doesn't exist in that case is because the creators have all had to go out of business. ;-)

Yeah but I don't care about that. I'm not here to make the system work. It's skewed against us consumers anyway.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Consumers are worth less than creators in the cosmic scheme of things. I believe we should be much friendlier to consumers than our laws currently allow, but there should be a balance, and that balance should not privilege consumers above all.

It is a bad thing. And the system is skewed against creators too. It favours exclusively the rent-seeking rich middle man.

Well, I'll drink to that!

There's subscription cost, then there's other factors, like DRM, usability, single source, etc. If you want to find the latest media, you can either hunt for it on one among several subscription services or you can find it on any of the big torrent sites. Once you torrent it, you can watch it on any or every device, without internet, forever.

If first party media companies sold one-off DRM free downloads of movies and TV shows for a reasonable price (not even that cheap, just not requiring bundling with other content you don't want to see), I bet that'd have more of an impact on piracy rates than lowering subscription prices by 10% or whatever.

No.

Music is basically sold like that (Itunes does it for example), and very very few people use it. There are probably some, but I don't personally know any — and I know plenty of music lovers with huge collections.

Normies want to have access to everything at the click of a button, and they don't want to be worrying about disk space, cross device synchronization or organizing files in directories. Streaming is perfect for them, especially in the mobile age (I bet many people had access to more disk space in 2013 than they had in 2021 or have in 2026).

People who would want to be normies but can't afford it (often in E.G. 3rd world countries) use Youtube with ads, Spotify with ads or pirated "free unlocked Spotify" apps on their Android phones. Music geeks want more music than they could possibly afford, so they use ${whatever this week's Deezer grabber is} or just get an account on Redacted. The anti-corporate left / retro people just buy vinyl, CDs or maybe tapes, depending on preference.

Paying to see a movie (versus paying to own a movie) has been a longstanding tradition in the movie industry (cinemas, rentals). If anything, being able to outright own movies was a short blip, and a weird consequence of how media worked at the time, which was annoying to most of the population more than anything else.

With power comes responsibility, and I think responsibility has fallen out of fashion. I think this comes down to the definition of "want", and I talk to my kids about this because I wish we had a different word. Yes, I want to have the piece of cake tonight, but I would also want to not have diabetes in 20 years. People want instant access to the entirety of music produced by humanity for a flat fee, but they also want to be able to access their music even if the industry that provides that service goes away. Curating a collection requires some responsibility and discipline, which is more work than just paying 15 bucks for the service and pressing play. But it also gives you access to that material in 20 years, which the service does not.

What the industry has successfully done is have people learn that for 15 or 20 years they can cave in to their want of convenience. People don't seem to care today that they'll have to pay the price in 15 years, but they will care in 15 years.

Nothing made this more evident than people buying digital movies from Sony, only to find that the rights to access the movie they purchased have been revoked. People are so sick of it in fact that they're now inventing new words like in enshitification to capture the idea that they have been brought in to an ecosystem that they're trapped in and now feel like they can't escape even though it's getting worse. People's love of convenience is the mechanism of their capture by the business.

In fairness once you've seen a movie its value drops with most never getting a second viewing. Them having the ability to take back that awful movie doesn't hurt as much as a song.

You do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them"

I have the largest physical media collection of anyone I know. I will buy things I can actually own, but with digital media the studios and labels have ensured purchasing no longer means ownership, and thus digital piracy is not stealing.

> I agree with that though. It's better to circumvent than to submit and do what you're told.

Not always. Sometimes the rules are stupid, and by simply obeying them, their stupidity becomes apparent. The governments that are trying to force Facebook and Google to pay to link to their news stories are a great example. The governments foolishly assumed that the media companies would comply by paying, but instead they chose to comply by leaving. Leaving is a powerful signal.

They're not paying to link. They're paying to summarise, because people read the summary and don't go to the news site.

> Sometimes the rules are stupid, and by simply obeying them, their stupidity becomes apparent.

This probably has to be in a "maliciously compliant" fashion though, as otherwise if you 'sort of' follow them things may actually still function. The point is often to show that things would not work if things were done by the book, so as to encourage the book to be rewritten or thrown out.

We can test this. Piracy used to exist and streaming services were cheap and good. Then piracy didn't exist because of that, and streaming services got expensive and worse. Now piracy exists again.

Piracy existed before,during and after. Things are getting expensive and profits are increasing because growth has slowed and investors want either growth in users or profits.

piracy for many, exists due to the freedoms it provides.

freedom todo format shift, copy, share, preserve, and largely a freedom from surveillance.

noone should be able to see what media u are viewing without ur explicit permission.

everytime u stream or buy, records of ur activity are created, and profiles are shared with brokers.

piracy done right, elimates all capitalism, but especially surveillance capitalism, and top down control over users of media

> Everytime u stream or buy, records of ur activity are created, and profiles are shared with brokers.

Unfortunately this applies even if you pirate. Your own TV you bought with your own money spies on you these days through automatic content recognition.

Well some people have always been pirates, but when Netflix offered a comprehensive catalogue for a decent price very few people still bothered to pirate. That was a big break from the early 2000s when pretty much everyone here in Europe pirated. We had this app called popcorn time which had everything and made it all super easy.

Now everything is split between services and prices constantly go up, you have to pay extra for viewing without ads etc. I see more and more people going back.

> Continuing to read things on it, even through Nitter, is in the interests of Twitter/X

Yet Twitter/X sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Nitter folks, which seems to contradict the idea that they think people reading content via Nitter is in their interest IMHO.

I don't think it's good to make myself less informed. I have no intention of chatting on Twitter casually or browsing it for fun, but if a major announcement is posted only on Twitter—and I don't know why people keep doing that, but they do—I want to read the original source.

Name and shame them.

Literally every single UK government entity, town/city council, every public transport company, etc. They all use it sadly.

Any specific examples where twitter was the only way?

As an anecdote from the States: During July 4th our city had some poor weather and the best way to check the status of any celebrations going on was their Twitter page.

A good example would be Supertram - the Sheffield tram service. It's only ever provided service disruption notices on twitter. The stations have digital signs which they installed years ago and have always been completely flawed in that they cant actually update them remotely, nor can they say if a tram is running late. They just play a fixed playlist on a loop.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI will sometimes make important announcements only on Twitter.

I haven't used that platform in years and I am still well enough informed. Don't be scared of not knowing everything. The important info will probably reach you. It's not like other platforms don't have people taking about interesting and important things.

I can never ever understand the sentiment of - 'If I do/do-not-do XYZ, it won't make a difference since millions of people are still not-doing/doing XYZ in the world'.

It gives same energy as "If I avoid murder, it won't make a difference since murders still happen in the world. If I avoid meat to help climate change, it won't make a difference since millions still eat meat".

The goal is not to get the WORLD to stop. It is to get ME to stop. I will reap its benefits regardless of what happens to others.

But you won't reap the benefits. You'll just be cut out of the conversation that's still happening.

To me, what you advocating for is performative self-flagellation, not a solution to the systemic issue.

The system's still there. You're just pretending it isn't and losing access to its contents. The more correct approach is to exfiltrate the information from the system while starving it of ad revenue.

> You'll just be cut out of the conversation

that's a bad thing ?

> you won't reap the benefits

but that IS my claim - I will reap benefits proportional to my actions (good or bad).

e.g. if global warming causes a flood, my house may be destroyed because I drove cars, but a boat would save me because I was vegetarian.

(the next salvo in this conversation will immediately turn into religious theology, so if that's not your thing, ignore this)

I think the problem is that it’s not black and white, it’s case by case. Some things are just not worth your effort/energy/opportunity cost. Like the difference you’re making by boycotting is so minuscule compared to the enormous downside to you. So you gotta draw your own line in that situation.

I also think the murder thing is different. A lot of these do/dont do xyz things are bad because so many people do/dont. If you were alone in doing/not doing it wouldn’t be an issue by itself. Of course that’s not true for Murder.

What is that with this random hate? There are tons of decent people posting/reading X. I am sure most of them do it because they like the site. Maybe because random detached from reality hate comments like that don't get much engagement.

One of the most hateful human being control this social network. There’s tons of decent people in a nazi bar isn’t the test of what makes it a great place to be.

I don't know if this works. They have their target audience. A different audience avoiding it doesn't make them shut down. I don't like sportsball, but me not watching a sportsball game doesn't make the league shut down.

It’s a social network. Less people on it = less ads dollar. You not building the network is making it less valuable and important. It’s something.

> The decent people won't hear them on Twitter/X, and the decent people will wonder what's wrong with them if they persist in supporting that thing.

Escaping this warped version of morality is precisely what many seek when browsing the site and the reason why many celebrated Musk's purchase.

Also why many say that bluesky is a shithole.

you need a mental check if you think there are not decent people who use and enjoy X

If THEY would use themselves as excuse for the rest, like you do with them, I wouldn't consider them decent people. There are decent people in the US military and police force, there may be even a stray decent ICE agent. I bet you there's decent people getting sent into the meat grinder by Putin, too. But if any of them were adamant about not wanting to hear about all sorts of fuckery of what they are part of or any overarching context, because they are oh so decent, they're not decent, they're just spineless. It's subjective anyway, and bitching about it never ever helps the verdict.

I've gone through several cycles of religion in my life. In various parts of that spectrum I've wondered why humans invented it. Five decades deep it's becoming more and more evident to me that there is some kind of deeply ingrained need for it in wide swaths of humanity...regardless of what it actually looks like in practice.

I don’t understand what your question has to do with op but I’ll explain it to you.

Religion and language are very similar, both in how they are transmitted and how they shift.

The latter systematizes thought and the former emotions.

Language is encoded by vocal utterances, characters, hand gestures, etc…

Religion by rituals, stories, customs. The purpose of it is to handle the common emotional needs of man. The starting point is the grief that comes from a dead person -> you need a ritual to handle the body and process emotions.

Next you need to handle who has sex with whom as that is another big area of emotional turbulence in man.

Then relationships between parent and child. And so on…

Write it down and get people to follow it, you have a religion. Which will shift and split over time as does language.

It can be completely distinct from the origin of everything though many choose to incorporate deities into their stories to give weight and meaning, this harnesses the inherent respect for father figures people tend to be born with to achieve this.

People will keep coming with an excuse like there is some crucial information posted exclusively on twitter and their life depends on it, like venue/corporate annoucements and whatever else SMM people are posting there

i see twitter's takedowns as the same? its claiming ownership over content it only has a license to

nitter is an instance of collective social action - it only works because people who want to post on and use twitter then mirror stuff to nitter

I stopped using it last year but after hearing the news they trained grok on child pornography I deleted my account.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/elon-musks-xai-u...

Is that particularly tech industry? Software and media piracy, ad block tools, etc. are all based on this principle.

We have to move people to mastodon or bluesky. Stop using x Twitter

Websites. It's websites. We're not moving from centralised platform A to centralised platform B in an age where people are giving up on centralised platforms altogether.

Non technical people have always used centralized platforms starting from geocities, Google, Yahoo, it's cheaper than hiring someone to do it for them.

On twitter there are many incredibly hateful, rude, ignorant and ill informed people and you can block them or add community notes. On mastodon or bluesky it's only them and no community notes.

No, that's almost as bad.

Locking knowledge into a benignly-ruled centralised blackbox instead of a despicably-ruled centralised blackbox isn't solving the core problem.

well, you can publish and consume ActivityPub from any wordpress instance. You can likewise publish to ATProto, AFAIK.

It's more convenient to use mastodon.social or bsky.app but they're not inherently "centralised blackboxes".

That's bluesky and mastodon working as intended. Easy like a centralized platform for everyone, while staying decentralized for nerds.

I feel like I'm living under a rock reading this post. What are the problems with Twitter, why does it need boycotting?

For starts, there's no such thing as Twitter any more, and hasn't been, for years.

Okay but that's not really relevant as the name changing is not a reason to leave/boycott?

There is no problem with X (formerly Twitter). Some people got their panties in a twist because Elon Musk bought it.

I don't want media under control of billionaires like Musk. I mostly stopped using Twitter myself but many important institutions still feel compelled to publish there (sometimes even exclusively), thus I would like other people to also stop using it, so it can perish. Hopefully something better will fill that void. The Fediverse seems promising being a distributed system with no central control.

I wish i could forget the last 6 years as well (to be clear, post COVID nonsense).

I doubt that works. They would be fine keeping it up indefinitely as their internal Slack. What I think would work better is to just keep using it like nothing happened except a child with skill issue has been ruining it, which require no pretentious, deliberate, or dishonest behavior.

The Twitter HQ had always fought its userbase and culture, not always relentlessly with passion, but never really loved it. The relationship between Twitter, Inc. and its user hivemind was always Clockwork Orange toxic. Though Musk trying to ruin it and getting his brain absolutely deep fried in a massive brain inflammation is his own doing, Musk ending up owning it in the first place, for the large part, is result of its former owners throwing in the towel.

Could you point to a resource that explains (concisely if possible) why twitter shouldn’t be used unlike other social media platforms?

Is it because it is controlled now by a different branch of the powers that be? (different branch — same tree).

I think it being controlled by that different branch is part of it, but that includes the undesirable attributes of that different branch, and I don't think we need to go into the details of those attributes lol

A related essay with the same take:

https://publiccomment.blog/p/it-is-past-time-for-you-to-quit...

Why is scrolling broken?

Hey I stopped using it and facebook years ago! Couldnt agree more.

The trouble is that many us government figures exclusively post information via x (and to some extent Facebook as well)

Are you speaking of public services, like the National Weather Service (also on Facebook, and host their own website), or about politicians and their appointees? Because while the public service arm of the U.S. government still does a ton of critical and often-underappreciated work, the semantic content of U.S. politicians' posts is effectively nil.

Both. (See for example @dhsgov)

Unfortunately those politicians are the ones who directly affect lives of all of us through their words and actions.

Your defeatist attitude is one of the reasons we are in this mess in the first place. Why should you or anyone else accept this as a status quo?

i too was thinking the Star Dink may just welcome nitter anyway

"oh you said 'nitter', yeah that's OK"

This all already happened, it's called bluesky, and the "decent" (people who agree with you on politics) people had their exodus already

To me, the divide Twitter/Bluesky is the divide between terminally only idiots and terminally online simpletons (you decide which is which). Decent people are on neither.

I see that they're not on HN either.

I don't know how HN has remained as chill as it has compared to other social media platforms, but I'm grateful. I can still have deep conversations here without people losing their minds and yelling expletives and death threats. It feels a lot like forums or Reddit back in the 2000s.

dang and team tread carefully but carry a big stick

HN remains chill because 99% of political dissent is squashed

Mostly reasonable moderation does it, I’ve seen a noticeable uptick in green accounts posting slop/weird stuff but I just flag them and move on.

HN isn’t perfect but it’s doesn’t have to be to still have value and yeah it does feel a lot like the older web at least more than most things do.

There are reasonable people who can grasp nuance on both platforms, but you can't deny that twitter/x has become known as a place that allows Nazi politics on it. Just look Elon, the owner..

It's seriously disingenuous to frame the bluesky vs twitter/x as a difference in political opinion.

Isn't nazi and non-nazi a political opinion difference though?

If you’re being pedantic, sure.

Edit: to elaborate, it’s bullshit that I need to pretend that Nazis have anything to say that’s worth listening to in the name of “polite political discourse”.

It’s an ideology built on hate and violence toward others.

You mean the people who hate Nazis? Yes, they're not on X.

BlueSky is so much more toxic than Twitter/X ever was. And I say that as a left-leaning centrist.

Eh, I think you may have just been in a tighter echo chamber on twitter. If you are on bluesky the discover tab is considered a mess and may provide you with things that you aren’t interested in.

Twitter is the country club for right and left wing elites. They don't care about viewership, they want to influence each other and chat.

They have thousands of other ways to influence the masses by owning media, other discussion platforms, owning institutions and foundation members and running PR campaigns.

It is better if their actions on Twitter are observed, documented and archived rather than letting them have complete privacy. That is also why journalists of all political leanings are still there.

it always seemed like a honeypot for narcissists to me. Some people just can't resist it

Are there any left wing elites?

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