Why I Left Twitter

This evening I logged off of Twitter for what I presume will be the last time. I feel like I owe everyone an explanation as to why, because just disappearing seems kind of like a dick move.

I know what you’re thinking, but let me preface this by saying that I’ve toyed with leaving Twitter for a long time now. While Elon Musk’s takeover is certainly a contributing factor, it is not simple cause and effect. I would consider Elon’s fiasco something of a last straw, a final nail in the coffin, certainly not the sole reason.

So, why did I do it? A lot of it comes down to Twitter being bad for my mental health, regardless of the ways I have tried to filter my timeline. I will go through long stretches where everything is just fine, but it doesn’t take much to put my mood into a downward spiral when the right combo hits. I thought I’d enumerate some of the things that have been bugging me.

• The burnout is strong. After more than a decade on Twitter, I’ve seen it transform from a simple microblogging platform into an algorithm-obsessed firehose designed purposefully to drive engagement through outrage. The algorithm can be mitigated to a certain extent, and I bent over backward to do so, but in the end, outrage seeps through even the best filters. Also, why should I have to bend over backward in the first place?
• Cruel, arbitrary, and capricious automoderation has bitten more than one of my friends. As of this writing, my friend @heavyrocksboar is still banned from his account, and has been for over a month, through absolutely no fault of his own. Every day, several of his friends and loved ones have reached out trying to get someone—literally any actual human—to review his case. The silence from Twitter is deafening.
• The bots, my god the bots! There are key phrases that you simply cannot say on Twitter without attracting a hoard of crypto bots or scam bots.
• The inability to live in a space somewhere between “Private Account” and “Public Account”. I have had my account protected from time to time, but that means I cannot interact with anyone who doesn’t follow me. It’s maddening that they can’t see my replies. But with a public account, you are always at the risk of randos dropping into your mentions, or a tweet blowing up that you didn’t want to blow up.
• And, finally, yes: Elon Musk. I’ve done everything I can to cut him out of my life, and yet there he is, swooping in to “rescue” Twitter. And you know what that means, right? Yes, the return of many banned extremist accounts, hoards more attacks on vulnerable people, and general shittiness. Truly the last straw.

I am going to miss so many people. I’ve tried to make myself reachable and I hope to keep in touch on Mastodon, and to a lesser extent on IRC.

(An aside about Mastodon: I don’t consider it a replacement for Twitter. It is its own thing. I am not going to ask anyone to jump ship to Mastodon because I’m honestly not sure how much I’m even going to use it myself. It has plenty of issues, it’s not great in plenty of ways. Culturally, though, I do think it’s a bit better than Twitter…)

So for now, it’s good bye. I will close by saying that I chose not to delete my Twitter account for two reasons: first because I wanted to preserve my username and keep what was there as an “historical record”, and second because I wanted to leave a pointer behind explaining where I’d gone.

(UPDATE: I actually did end up deleting my old tweets, and just updated my bio with a pointer)

My love to you all! I hope we meet again soon.