Ex-Twitter

I joined Twitter in January 2008. In the earlier days, Twitter could be something fun. While it never took off in the same way as it social media peers, it managed to hang around thanks to its unique utility of microblogging and quickly conveying information (or, as time would show, quite a lot of misinformation). Like most Silicon Valley services based on exponential user growth, Twitter could not figure out a way to curtail abuse without harming growth. Its attempts to prevent hate speech were inconsistent, and it could not apply its rules evenly across its user base. For all of the talk of “free speech,” it was clear that some people (like the former President), had freer speech than others until they crossed an arbitrary line (it wasn’t really a show of bravery for Twitter to shut down Donald Trump’s account after he attempted a coup and only had two weeks left in his term anyway).

As bad as Twitter was, it has crashed and burned spectacularly under the ownership of its new owner, Elon Musk, who has now renamed the app “X” because he thinks everything he does should involve the 24th letter of the alphabet. While it was kind of amusing to see Musk flail about spectacularly, I imagine it was less fun for employees who lost their jobs for not being sycophantic enough or the people who have built a following on Twitter only to now feel torn between rebuilding that audience elsewhere or seeing if they can stay afloat on Musk’s leaky ship.

I’m sure there’s plenty to diagnose in terms of why Musk did this. Almost a year after a purchase (a purchase, it should be noted, that he rushed into without due diligence and then tried to back out of), it looks like Musk, a less charismatic version of Charles Foster Kane, has simply turned Twitter into any other right-wing social media app. The only difference is he had a user base that he thought would stay as opposed to trying to build something from scratch like Gab, Parler, or Truth Social. Of course, these other right-wing social media sites have largely failed because A) it’s not much fun owning the libs if there are no libs around; and B) in the case of Truth Social and now Twitter, it’s just an expression of a pathetic billionaire’s personal grievances. Donald Trump and Elon Musk may wield a lot of power, but they’re not particularly interesting individuals because they, like most insecure people, lack curiosity and humility.

But a lot of companies are owned by doofuses, and if I didn’t want to pay attention to these two jabronis, couldn’t I just mute them? Unfortunately, in the case of Twitter, Musk has essentially broken the platform and asked users to crawl through the shards if they want to keep using it. There are no more interesting discussions because responses from Twitter Blue subscribers are put first rather than the responses that are the most interesting (anyone silly enough to pay for Twitter isn't exactly the most insightful or engaging contributor). This is on top of the way the site keeps breaking whether it’s restricting the amount of tweets a user can make in a day, not clearly and consistently marking promoted tweets as “promoted,” and limiting DMs for non-Blue users. It’s certainly not going to get better as Musk works to extort brands who don’t pay him $12,000 a year to prevent fraudulent accounts from impersonating them.

For me, the line comes with the site’s lack of any Trust & Safety team, which means that videos of animal abuse can just pop up anywhere, and now reinstating an account that had posted child sexual abuse material (CSAM). That’s not a malfunctioning website. That’s an open cesspool, and there’s really no reason I can see to swim around in it. I wouldn’t patronize any other website that posted that material, so why would I keep using Twitter?

This isn’t to condemn anyone who is still using Twitter because I’m not here to play scold. You’re an adult and you make your choices. But watching Twitter crash and burn under Musk’s leadership is no longer fun for me. The circus becomes a lot less amusing when the clown sets the tent on fire.

I’m also not saying that other social media sites are “good.” Facebook and Instagram, Meta’s products, feel like worse versions of what they used to be long ago (for more on that, read Cory Doctorow’s article on “Enshittification.”), and Bluesky, while still in beta, seems oblivious to obvious problems like letting people choose offensive usernames. And maybe the whole concept of social media has always been doomed because it has bad incentives that are made worse by investors trying to extract the maximum amount of profit while doing as little as possible to enhance the user experience.

Maybe I’ll leave all those sites in time. Maybe the Internet as we built it simply cannot work anymore because Big Tech can neither deliver a viable product nor keep it running well should it somehow manage to make something that people like. But I’m not leaving the entire Internet today, and I’ve left my Twitter account up (but locked, so no new followers) so people can find me elsewhere.

I don’t want to romanticize what Twitter was. There were times where it was entertaining, but there were also times when it would use the power of the mob to harass anyone for the most imagined of slights. The platform consistently encouraged the most uncharitable readings of the innocuous tweets because the mob was always hungry to find a villain and mock them relentlessly to create that day’s drama. That’s to say nothing of days when you could easily fall into a pattern of doomscrolling as every depressing world event came across the screen sans context and made you feel guilty for not saving the world by yourself. Yes, Twitter could be funny, but it could also be a nightmare.

Whatever Twitter is now becoming, I don’t really want a part of it. This is the stopping point. You can still find me elsewhere (like this Substack!), but I don’t need to be stay in Musk’s disgusting little clubhouse.