Goodbye Twitter

Twitter is a dumpster fire right now, and it makes me sad, but it also means I can’t in good conscience keep using it until its major issues are sorted out. Let me explain.

Why Twitter?

Twitter is the first “other” platform I ever used to supplement the channel. I didn’t want to do any social media around my channel at first, but it turned out that after a video review of elementary OS 5, the official elementary OS account tweeted my video, and someone let me know about it. The channel was extremely small and I felt I needed to thank them, so I created a Twitter account, and said thanks.

And then I started looking at what I could do on Twitter, and I stuck around. It was fun, there was always something new to see, someone new to interact with, and a cool discussion to be had. Sure, there were also idiots, bigots, goalpost-moving trolls, people who would dissect every tweet to find fault, and other who exclusively interact in bad faith, but if you were liberal with the mute button and if you learned to limit yourself to topics that you knew you were ready to handle a conversation on, Twitter was a great place.

And then the Musk nation attacked.

The Acquisition

Musk came in all guns blazing, with all his “free speech” rhetoric. And it turned out to be the end of Twitter as I liked it. Because free speech NOT come back to Twitter, as it’s more heavily censored nowadays than it’s ever been, with links to other media platforms being removed, criticism against Musk being banned, journalist’s accounts being removed if they even remotely touch anything approaching a Musk critic, and the amount of hate speech and brazen racism, antisemitism and other ignominious types of speech has risen so much it’s out of control.

But that, in itself, isn’t why I’m leaving. I’m leaving because I can’t dissociate myself from it. It’s as much a product of the “new Twitter” Musk has made than a product of myself: I can’t use Twitter AND ignore all these facts. I can’t block / mute everyone that has anything to do with these despicable behaviors and do as if nothing was happening.

And so I keep talking about every stupid thing Musk does, which is basically a daily job in itself. I keep trying to interact with people who either don’t understand the difference between an opinion and being actively hateful, or people who feign to ignore the difference for some reason. I basically only open Twitter to see what new idiotic decision Musk has made, and criticize it. It’s become untenable, and it has silenced any other conversation. Everyone staying on Twitter is now either doing it to defend Elon, or to attack what he does, and so the whole platform is now completely useless to me, and not fun anymore.

I’m out

And so as of the writing of this post, I’ll only post one last Tweet for the time being: a tweet to this article. I’ll delete the application, and stop using it for a while. If I hear through the gravepine that things are getting better, that Musk is stepping down and being replaced by someone else, or that things are just settling down, maybe I’ll consider coming back.

In the meantime, I’ll be on Mastodon, as I’ve been for a long while, and I’ll keep posting the usual crap there, but Elon-free this time, so conversations should be a lot more interesting.

If you want to follow any of my social networks, all the links are in the header of this website!

That’s it for this post, thanks for reading, and I guess I’ll see you on the purple elephant app.