It is not a secret that twitter changed to muskitter some time ago. Now, a lot of garbage reichwinger crap is not being filtered out. Each time people are discussing the exodus, they bring up this:
xitter is full of reichwingers, it bombards you with them by default!
you get a lot of that garbage in replies and, for some odd reason you aren’t allowed to delete comments to your own post. Weird, huh? In a blog if I see someone is a trollbag, I wipe them out, to clean the area of their idiotic crap, since they have negative value. Also, consider the coordinated attacks by shady firms making ai-bots to sh*t up your replies with hate and negativity to make all good intention people feel yucky and leave. Why wouldn’t you let people clean their own posts?
Visibility is a big problem and total lack of transparency. Why can’t people see posts of someone? Why they don’t pop up, while hater morons do? Shady? Yeah.
Quitting is good for your mental health. Okay, probably.
However, there is a huge problem. Quitting is admitting defeat, it is shutting up, losing audience, leaving platform for hater-bots and deranged reichwinger nuts.
Is this really a lose-lose fork?
As far as I know alternative platforms are confusing to use, and still small. Bluesky, threads etc are a bit simpler.
What to do? Is it losing time? Thoughts?
And? That way the have more influence on other audience, it will make an illusion that everyone thinks like them. If you can’t be heard you don’t exist.
Isn’t what you suggest just defeatism?
I am not speaking for myself, I don’t use it personally. It is mostly a social tactics and strategy question. Where are we heading as society? Deplatforming yourself is not really a solution to anything, right?
I ditched it long ago. MUCH better for my mental health. There are other platforms out there, and the sooner people stop paying attention to (and therefore garnering $$ for) Xitter the better. Let them howl into the wasteland of their own creation.
I never took it up because I thought its text limitations would stunt user intellectual development and lead to the downfall of mankind. January 6 is proof that I was right.
X is a business. When a business does stuff you don’t like, you stop giving them your patronage. Is it “admitting defeat” to stop eating at a restaurant where they spit in your food? There’s no brave stance here, just Elon Musk wanting your participation to make his platform successful and you giving it to him.
I still have a “live” profile. But I uninstalled the app and changed the screen name to insult Elon and the profile banner to a dumpster fire, and I no longer interact with the platform.
What content are you producing on Twitter that you are seeking out user engagement? Have you started to try simulcasting on BlueSky to try to migrate your followers?
I’m on Twitter as a consumer, not a creator. I could care less who reads my posts, other than the creators I try to engage with every so often. When I do, I haven’t had any issues whatsoever, and the nazi-trolls aren’t usually in my corner of Twitter anyway.
Joining Twitter was a bad idea to start with. Leaving is good for you, for your mental health, for society in general and as a matter of good taste.
If you fall into a river full of sewage it is not admitting defeat if you get out of it and take a shower.
Make a webpage and direct people there if you want to reach out: you can control everything there. You can erase nasty comments, block nazis, upload whatever you want. No censorship, no manipulation but your own.
What, your audience does not find you? Why not? It did find you on Twitter (or so you think). What are you doing wrong on www that you are doing better on Twitter?
Same goes for Facebook, btw.
Lots of people seem to be moving to Threads in the last few weeks. I’m on Bluesky, Threads, X, and Mastodon, but I only really look at Threads these days.
I don’t understand the OP at all – there are plenty of places fill with hateful bigots and rightwingers. X can be one more place that they spend just talking to each other. Who cares what happens to X?
We need only a small handful of major “hub” personalities to migrate somewhere to create the necessary center of gravity. And maybe not even that many. Like, if Taylor Swift abandons Xitter for Threads, stick a fork in it, it’s all over.
I’ve muted, and rarely blocked the dingbats. The result is a tolerable feed of mostly sane folks, though I can tell what morons are saying when their stuff is commented on. Still easy to ignore the noise.
Abandoning the platform to sleazebags seems like a bad choice to me. Just don’t invest that much in it.
*“Laughing at and irritating the unrighteous since 2021” might as well be my Twitter motto.
Good luck then.
I am also a reader, mostly.
But I am still concerned what size of bubble I am in. I mean, going and hiding in a safe space is nice, but if the masses just read and repeat whatever hateful nonsense is being shown to their eyes, we have a problem. Yeah I am not a firm believer in a concept that people are rational, wholesome and determined. Often they are opportunistic and easily influenced by others and will happily join a bully gang if just for not being the victim themselves. That’s a sad fact of life, many are just following others and imitating them, for better or worse.
It would be cool of current twatter would shutdown, but if it doesn’t? All those people still remain IRL, getting more brainwashed by the day, and without dissenting voices they are easy fodder for propagandists. All I see cattur* and endwo*eness everywhere and an army of their parrots advancing their grip on public discourse. How to fight that?
I really hope that happens. But I guess you need to be a well equipped analyst to make any quality predictions how it will turn out.
I don’t even know how the business model works, what hidden levers there are etc. Advertisers, cross-platforming, integration with other sites.
There’s other options besides “Endure waves of moronic right-wing trolling and Russian AI bot nonsense on Twitter” and “Hiding in a safe space bubble”. If you want to read what the conservatives of America are on about, there’s numerous sites happy to give you conservative-slanted news and opinions.
It’ll only get worse; Musk will make sure of that. And he’s done enough damage to its infrastructure that its functionality will continue to decline. It’s a dead site walking, best to go somewhere else.