The only reason I've heard someone suggest to move from Twitter is because the new owner opened his mouth about political views.
So. I've been on Twitter 15 years, since early 2007. I feel a lot of affection to it in some ways, but particularly over the decade, it has become in many ways a pretty unpleasant experience. And yet I was still there. Matt Levine on Twitter:
My favorite might be Ben Thompson’s rather bearish post, which argues essentially that Twitter is a very unpleasant product that most people do not want to use, but is extremely appealing and addictive to a small minority of us with significant personality flaws.
He's probably not wrong.
Elon has either promised to, or already has, made the site worse in a number of ways:
- The paid checkmark thing. People who pay for this will, Musk has promised, have their tweets essentially boosted by the algorithm. Frankly, I don't particularly want to hear from the sort of person who's buying the checkmarks, and paying for attention is a corrosive design dynamic. Even dating apps, which invented it, at this point mostly realise it can only be used sparingly without destroying the experience (for instance, Grindr has a thing where you can pay a couple of euro to appear higher in the grid of people than you should for an hour or something, but not permanently, because then the grid would be permanently full of the sort of people who pay for attention, and no-one wants that.)
- He's bringing back all manner of complete monsters. There are the big high-profile ones, of course, but also thousands of local monsters. Irish twitter got a lot better a few years back when a couple of prominent local Neo-Nazis were sent on their way, say. Twitter moderation was already too lax; this is very much going the wrong direction.
- A lot of the people I liked following have either already left, or are much less active.
- I find Elon personally extremely irritating, and there's just no escaping him on Twitter right now.
After 15 years, I'm basically done. I'm keeping the account for now (you never know; there's a bit of a history of social media sites being re-sold after a bad acquisition), but Mastodon is now filling the gap for me. It's pretty good; there are some annoyances, but in general it scratches the same itch as Twitter without a lot of the irritants.
I do think one mistake Elon makes is that he seems to think everyone loves Twitter. My suspicion is that most Twitter users, or at least most heavy users, find Twitter barely tolerable, but addictive. It doesn't take much to make people in that situation say "screw this".
Comments
So. I've been on Twitter 15 years, since early 2007. I feel a lot of affection to it in some ways, but particularly over the decade, it has become in many ways a pretty unpleasant experience. And yet I was still there. Matt Levine on Twitter:
He's probably not wrong.
Elon has either promised to, or already has, made the site worse in a number of ways:
- The paid checkmark thing. People who pay for this will, Musk has promised, have their tweets essentially boosted by the algorithm. Frankly, I don't particularly want to hear from the sort of person who's buying the checkmarks, and paying for attention is a corrosive design dynamic. Even dating apps, which invented it, at this point mostly realise it can only be used sparingly without destroying the experience (for instance, Grindr has a thing where you can pay a couple of euro to appear higher in the grid of people than you should for an hour or something, but not permanently, because then the grid would be permanently full of the sort of people who pay for attention, and no-one wants that.)
- He's bringing back all manner of complete monsters. There are the big high-profile ones, of course, but also thousands of local monsters. Irish twitter got a lot better a few years back when a couple of prominent local Neo-Nazis were sent on their way, say. Twitter moderation was already too lax; this is very much going the wrong direction.
- A lot of the people I liked following have either already left, or are much less active.
- I find Elon personally extremely irritating, and there's just no escaping him on Twitter right now.
After 15 years, I'm basically done. I'm keeping the account for now (you never know; there's a bit of a history of social media sites being re-sold after a bad acquisition), but Mastodon is now filling the gap for me. It's pretty good; there are some annoyances, but in general it scratches the same itch as Twitter without a lot of the irritants.
I do think one mistake Elon makes is that he seems to think everyone loves Twitter. My suspicion is that most Twitter users, or at least most heavy users, find Twitter barely tolerable, but addictive. It doesn't take much to make people in that situation say "screw this".