'Users interested in NSFW and cryptocurrency content grew'

October 26, 2022 5:25 AM

'Where did the Tweeters Go?' (Reuters) These “heavy tweeters” account for less than 10% of monthly overall users but generate 90% of all tweets and half of global revenue. Heavy tweeters have been in “absolute decline” since the pandemic began, a Twitter researcher wrote in an internal document.
posted by box (118 comments total)

Well, my disgust with the insurrectionists got me booted. Maybe lots of anti - insurrection people got booted…
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 5:29 AM on October 26, 2022 [12 favorites]

This is just the 90/9/1 rule surely? When I worked in social media I remember Facebook pages followed that logic.

I wonder if MeFi does?
posted by treblekicker at 5:35 AM on October 26, 2022 [13 favorites]

Honestly if there is less focus on celebrities and fashion on a platform, I’m all for it. I don’t understand why “rich person wore specific outfit” is a news headline, but it seems to be treated with the same level of importance as “Putin invades Ukraine” in a lot of sites ostensibly focused on news.

On the flip side, if Musk buys Twitter, I’m more than likely going to kill my account.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:43 AM on October 26, 2022 [16 favorites]

Yeah, not surprising. Sounds like a classic power law distribution.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 5:46 AM on October 26, 2022 [3 favorites]

Some of us want a site for celebrities and fashion (I do note you’re not referencing male-coded interests) rather than (horrible, stress-inducing) news. News has news sites.

I do like some science mixed in with my fashion and celebrities though.
posted by hydrobatidae at 6:01 AM on October 26, 2022 [37 favorites]

...a shift in interests over the past two years among Twitter's most active English-speaking users that could make the platform less attractive to advertisers... interest in news, sports and entertainment is waning among those users.

Sounds like the cool people who bring in the big advertising bucks aren't on Twitter much anymore, leaving the place to Elon Musk and crypto bros, and who wants to associate their brand with that?
posted by clawsoon at 6:05 AM on October 26, 2022

DISCLAIMER: This is my uncensored reaction to just reading the lead here, and it is really, REALLY dark:

Maybe some of the heavy tweeters were anti-vaxxers, and the reason why their work declined is because a lot of them died.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:12 AM on October 26, 2022 [31 favorites]

I have a buddy who used twitter pretty heavily to promote his side gig. He's not a Big Shot - 11k followers is all - but he has explicitly stated that the algorithmic changes have made tweeting vastly less useful to him, and the downsides now almost entirely outweigh the upsides.

I also know more and more creatives who are turning back to newsletters - usually with some mix of paid and free content - because there are fewer and fewer ways to monetize content on the internet, and Twitter sure ain't one. What Twitter is complaining about is their free content generators moving on to find venues that actually compensate them - Twitter used to do it, in clicks and notoriety, and this seems to be falling off heavily if you're not interested in participating in pile-ons or doom spirals or one of the other usually negative high-interaction modes.

Twitter always had a rent-seeking business model, entirely dependent on labor compensated only by nebulous and intangible rewards. But those rewards have largely been negated by the rent-seeking drive itself, and if Twitter doesn't figure out a way out of that particular tangle, they're in trouble.

I've quit before, and I will 100% quit again, even if I will miss the blaseball folks.
posted by restless_nomad at 6:12 AM on October 26, 2022 [66 favorites]

....and now that I've read the article I look like a real heel. I own that.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:14 AM on October 26, 2022 [11 favorites]

People are being driven away because Twitter's moderation and troll detection is somewhere between non-existent and antagonistic.

You can't have any sort of conversation in good faith on the site without being dogpiled by a bunch of accounts that are clearly fake. I'm talking "handle is word plus 8 digits" fake, not "they disagree with me in a stupid manner" fake.

1-2 days ago, a woman with around 10k followers made a completely innocuous post about enjoying spending a few hours in the mornings with her husband enjoying coffee and chatting. She got dogpiled by users for daring to enjoy a life that sounds only luxurious compared to the complete misery others find themselves in. It might well be a crab-pot, but it also has been proven that the site's rife with false-flag accounts stirring the shit.
posted by explosion at 6:15 AM on October 26, 2022 [52 favorites]

Twitter got popular among the wrong people, so now the right people are moving on, something that seems to happen to every social network that doesnt have strong active moderation.

I think people are starting up substack and medium accounts.
posted by subdee at 6:18 AM on October 26, 2022 [12 favorites]

Twitter does everything possible to suck the utility out of using it. I say that as someone who still uses it, but only because the app I use (Echofon) doesn’t show ads at all. If I had to use their app or the web interface I couldn’t tolerate it. I’m still using it because there’s a few friends there, and I won’t use Meta products at all, so it’s a slight chance of social connection. And I post my art there as I do on tumblr and mastodon.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:23 AM on October 26, 2022 [10 favorites]

A "heavy tweeter" is defined as someone who logs in to Twitter six or seven days a week and tweets about three to four times a week, the document said.

That is a surprisingly generous definition for a "heavy" user of any social media. I don't think I would place someone who comments on Reddit, or Facebook, or even Metafilter four times a week as a "heavy" user.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:01 AM on October 26, 2022 [23 favorites]

I suspect it's mostly numbers: heavy Tweeters would care about their audience, and if you work your ass off using Twitter, you'll maybe get many thousands of likes/retweets. But on TikTok? Millions of views without really trying. Jason Pargin (formerly of Cracked.com) had been working hard to build an audience through mainly Twitter, started a TikTok account a few weeks ago, and has been writing about his astonishment at how easy it is to get traction and reach on that platform if viewers like your videos.

Ultimately, Twitter and Facebook were still pretty early movers in the social media cultural space, and their models appear to be in the process of being supplanted by more effective ones. Not sure there's much Twitter can do, other than become a different kind of social media site.
posted by LooseFilter at 7:12 AM on October 26, 2022 [14 favorites]

I'm with LooseFilter, it's TikTok. The average user spends 95 minutes a day on the platform.

It makes twitter's definition of "heavy" look like a dismissed pop-up notification.
posted by JoeZydeco at 7:15 AM on October 26, 2022 [26 favorites]

The younger set in our household is 100% on TikTok (Insta in close second), and they couldn't give a rat's ass about Twitter. Some of them have accounts out of a bit of FOMO or maybe ironic use, but that's about it.

TL;DR - if (as is pointed out above) you are a content creator who is chasing growth, it's not on Twitter any more. Twitter seems likely to be consigned to the same fate as Facebook: the domain of the old and angry.
posted by jquinby at 7:23 AM on October 26, 2022 [10 favorites]

But Twitter and TikTok aren't even kind of doing the same thing. It's like saying that 90-Day Fiance and 60 Minutes are both TV shows. Would 60 Minutes be more popular if it were more like 90-Day Fiance? I mean...maybe, with an entirely different group of people who wanted something that isn't happening on 60 Minutes, sure! Are people really leaving Twitter in droves for TikTok, and if so, is what they're getting from TikTok a one-for-one substitution for what they were getting from Twitter?
posted by kittens for breakfast at 7:25 AM on October 26, 2022 [11 favorites]

a bunch of accounts that are clearly fake. I'm talking "handle is word plus 8 digits" fake

Most of them are accounts generated from the cellphone app, which assigns name + random numbers accounts by default. They never were savvy enough to get to the setting option where you can choose a username.
posted by sukeban at 7:26 AM on October 26, 2022 [9 favorites]

Twitter is the worst social network, apart from all the others. After nine years I have just reached the huge milestone of 100 followers. 3 Digits. Some obvious bots but they still count.

If Musk does complete the purchase then it is going to be hard to walk away from that legacy.
posted by AndrewStephens at 7:29 AM on October 26, 2022 [13 favorites]

"Twitter and TikTok aren't even kind of doing the same thing."

Perhaps, but I suspect that many of those leaving Twitter use social media to cultivate parasocial relationships with other (famous?) users -- and TikTok delivers that particular dopamine hit in spades.
posted by MrJM at 7:34 AM on October 26, 2022 [12 favorites]

TikTok (and Instagram) also have something that I have never seen on Twitter - paid influencer deals. I worked at a little nutritional supplement company earlier this year (dried beef liver is apparently In right now, for some reason) and our top Insta influencer, who made 10% of every purchase via their affiliate link and 20% of every purchase of our own-brand products, made approximately $40,000 a month. The top ten or so paid influencers we had drove the vast, vast majority of our successful and growing business.
posted by restless_nomad at 7:46 AM on October 26, 2022 [22 favorites]

and our top Insta influencer, who made 10% of every purchase via their affiliate link and 20% of every purchase of our own-brand products

Whoa, whoa, this person is taking ten to twenty cents off every dollar? Is this a normal arrangement, or is this person one of the owners of the actual store?
posted by kittens for breakfast at 7:51 AM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

I wonder how many are being lost to Discord? It's not really a Twitter replacement, but I find it does do at least some of what I actually want from Twitter. In particular, there can be more of a sense of a community, and it feels like you can discuss things without keeping an eye over your shoulder, at least in the servers I'm in.

(I'm another person who doesn't dislike Twitter - it's not ideal andadmittedly I've never yet been dogpiled for having an opinion, but I would be unhappy to see it go.)
posted by scorbet at 7:52 AM on October 26, 2022 [7 favorites]

What I use Twitter for: news and anodyne bits of information such as NYC alternate side parking and traffic conditions on the George Washington Bridge.

I’m not keen to give any support to a Musk-headed platform, but I don’t see how to easily get that kind of info.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 7:53 AM on October 26, 2022 [4 favorites]

I can subscribe (and unsubscribe) to text messsges about that kind of thing from my city. Not in NYC?
posted by clew at 7:55 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

Can’t go to Substack because they built their reputation on throwing money at the most awful people on Twitter, ironically enough.
posted by Yowser at 7:55 AM on October 26, 2022 [8 favorites]

Remember the good old days, when everybody was on Facebook? First, it was hard to get a FB account because it was only for ivies, and then they opened it up and everybody shared everything there? And communities were built, and people with similar interests found each other. It was great!

And then all the kids decided facebook was for their parents, they wanted a place where they could sext and say their new-fangled words and not have Aunt Lydia seeing everything. And so all of the people who were mostly interested in shoes and music went to Instagram, and the only people left were the olds, and FB realized that you can market products to people who are mostly interested in shoes and music, but not so much the people who are in the model-ship-building and gardening clubs.

So then they just started marketing the only thing that would make the olds feel: anger. And the anger was mostly political. And after a while most of the olds got tired of all of that and moseyed on over to twitter and Instagram. They had all had twitter accounts, but they hadn't used them much, because why? They can already post their thoughts on FB.

But sure yes they did move over to twitter, and in typical old people fashion, they tried to engage with each other, by providing their opinions on things people said, which. That isn't really what it's here for, is it. At the end of the day, we're here for the para-social relationships, aren't we. So everybody cluttered up Twitter with their stupid comments, and so people moved over to TikTok, where we can get that hit of dopamine, that clever little joke, that little musical motif layered under completely disparate videos over and over and over. That's more like it.

And so now the only people left on twitter are the ones who want to talk to each other, but the problem is most of them don't really have anything to say, they just want to react to what other people are saying. Which will be a problem when they move over to TikTok because it doesn't really work that way does it.
posted by nushustu at 7:56 AM on October 26, 2022 [13 favorites]

Whoa, whoa, this person is taking ten to twenty cents off every dollar? Is this a normal arrangement, or is this person one of the owners of the actual store?

Nope. This is the normal arrangement. The company is growing so fast (and is so particular about its quality and suppliers) that the biggest barrier is keeping the product in stock.
posted by restless_nomad at 7:56 AM on October 26, 2022 [3 favorites]

Me: so that’s Insta and TikTok. I know you just use Facebook to see pictures of your cousins. What about Twitter? Where’s that these days?

My 18yo: Dad. Twitter is just people screaming and cancelling each other.
posted by mph at 7:56 AM on October 26, 2022 [30 favorites]

What I use Twitter for: news and anodyne bits of information

Same here, and I'm really gonna miss that if I need to delete my account soon. Twitter as a decoupled message bus is really useful at times. Like my city has a few accounts and tweets road closures, fire department actions, etc. But we all know that doesn't deliver ad dollars and omg shareholder growth.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:00 AM on October 26, 2022 [10 favorites]

My kid does Discord, where she has a server (or servers?) with her friends. They use it to voice chat in games as well as general communications. A lot of game companies have their own servers, and it's easy to look at one particular company's stuff, since it doesn't do facebook's firehose of everything at you.
My wife does TikTok for short amusing videos, which is apparently it's brand, and we still do facebook for family/friends, although I use it a lot less now that it's not on my phone.
posted by Spike Glee at 8:02 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

facebook's firehose of everything at you

Facebook does this? My feed is just stuff people I'm
"friends" with are posting or sharing - isn't that the default setup?
posted by Dysk at 8:09 AM on October 26, 2022

I never understand why companies think that their social media network is the one that will last. Remember MySpace? Remember Friendster? It all dies eventually. Facebook will not survive forever, neither will Twitter. Facebook was at least smart enough to buy Instagram, which will die eventually too, or be sued into oblivion as the new Big Tobacco.
posted by Slinga at 8:10 AM on October 26, 2022 [9 favorites]

But we all know that doesn't deliver ad dollars and omg shareholder growth.

I wonder how much the American economy has been shaped by the tax preference given to capital gains over dividends. Instead of building companies that spit out money for their shareholders, every company has to be obsessed with growing and growing and growing and growing because that's how to ensure the highest rate of after-tax returns.
posted by clawsoon at 8:12 AM on October 26, 2022 [18 favorites]

I think there is also a lifespan to the social media platforms that the owners of the platforms (naturally) don’t want to see — Facebook has peaked, and is beginning to slide into irrelevance (and I don’t think the Metaverse is going to a) impress the olds that are there or lure the youngs back), Twitter is just hitting that point, TikTok might go a different direction, but it seems like none of the platforms has more than 10-15 years in them.
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:13 AM on October 26, 2022 [4 favorites]

I still like Twitter, but my account is deliberately private--life's too short to deal with randos spraying their stupid opinions at me--as is my Insta. Twitter is where most of my Barbelith friendships are, as well as using the hashtag of my city for very relevant up to date happenings in town. I would not want to abandon it as there's really no place else to keep in touch with my Barbe-friends. (I killed my FB account after the 2016 US election.)
posted by Kitteh at 8:14 AM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think Facebook may serve different versions of the newsfeed to different people, depending on usage. I only check FB a few times a week, and only on a browser with Facebook Container installed. I've posted three things in the last twelve months, and rarely 'like' or whatnot "friends'" posts. I've noticed that the newsfeed tends to be about 10% people I know, and 90% ads/recommended content. Lately a lot of the recommended content has been for alt-right bullshit, so I use it even less! I've heard people who engage more actively report things more like you, Dysk, though.

I think there are extensions one can install to see more "friend" content, but, frankly, why would I bother?
posted by Alterscape at 8:14 AM on October 26, 2022 [4 favorites]

I don’t think the Metaverse is going to a) impress the olds that are there or lure the youngs back

Among other things, the Metaverse is a bunch of techbros not so much reinventing the wheel as reinventing the Segway.
posted by restless_nomad at 8:16 AM on October 26, 2022 [26 favorites]

I'm with LooseFilter, it's TikTok. The average user spends 95 minutes a day on the platform.

This is why I keep my TikTok account at arm's length. It is too easy to lose A LOT of time watching stuff on there.
posted by Kitteh at 8:17 AM on October 26, 2022 [5 favorites]

I use twitter to find things out. There's a lot of journalists & analysts on there who have things to say that I need to know about. There are legitimate threats that a lot of people are pretending aren't real. What if I just want a place where I can read & write about what's going on. Is that too much to ask.
posted by bleep at 8:21 AM on October 26, 2022 [10 favorites]

Facebook sends a lot more paid and/or suggested content at people (well, at me), and I've assumed that part of that is that regular user-generated content isn't up to the volume it used to be.

Only about half the people in my circle are on Facebook (and me and my friends are old!). For several people, Messenger is as important or more so than the FB feed itself--but that's more as person-to-person comms, not "social" activity.

I left Twitter for years, recently got back, yes, it's still a cesspool, but there are maybe two or three people with really good neighborhood/city info that I follow there. Plus, some of the "osint" stuff related to Ukraine this year was really great (not all of it, but some was). If it weren't for that, I'd return to having no use for Twitter. I don't need it to contact actual friends.

A couple of super-yucky places I've mostly extricated myself from: NextDoor (all racist neighbors, all the time!) and Quora, which makes you really, really appreciate the mediation and culture on AskMe.
posted by gimonca at 8:22 AM on October 26, 2022 [4 favorites]

Ah, Quora, the site that started Jordan Peterson on his supervillain arc.
posted by clawsoon at 8:37 AM on October 26, 2022 [11 favorites]

I closed my account after Musk said he’d buy twitter, and I do not miss it. Even following a link to twitter is annoying as it is designed to make you sign in, but I don’t want to. I was a user for over 13 years and had over a thousand followers when I closed my account, so it’s not like I didn’t invest a lot into twitter. However, every decision they made seemed to be anti-user, and after a while it just drove me away. Which reminds me: I should donate to metafilter…
posted by The River Ivel at 8:38 AM on October 26, 2022 [8 favorites]

I used to count as a "heavy" by this article's metric -- 5K or so followers, several tweets a day just from linkspam posting (I bookmark a lot of stuff and had an IFTTT recipe sending bookmarks to Twitter; apparently people found this useful!), plenty of interaction with my major professional community (librarianship) and following folks in a couple-three other communities (edtech, infosec, privacy).

I largely stopped posting to Twitter when Oxboy made his first bid for it. Linkspam has been redirected to Mastodon, and I'm still building a list of follows there. It's not as good as Twitter for what I used Twitter for -- not by a long chalk; if there's Big Infosec News it routinely breaks on Twitter -- but if Oxboy does genuinely get ownership, that's it, I'm gone... and I'm just arrogant enough to think that means a hole in the librarian community/discourse there. I think whoever did this analysis would do well to also look at what's going on with smallish, insular-ish discourse networks, like librarianship and edtech and infosec.

I barely see TikTok at all and do not have an account there, for what it's worth.
posted by humbug at 8:39 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

They went to Gab, obv.
posted by meehawl at 8:40 AM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is horrible to say, but I truly believe that Twitter's peak was because of Donald Trump. I became active on Twitter after the 2016 election, largely to follow the various "AltGov" accounts that were popping up. Political news during the Trump administration was a literal fire hose, because he did crazy shit all day every day, and Twitter was the best place to get real-time updates on what was going on. It was like watching an extended car wreck for four straight years, but I got hooked on it.

Now that he's out of office, I can go days without thinking about Joe Biden (not recently, but you know). As such, my Twitter usage has dropped off considerably in the last two years. I still check most days, but I don't spend nearly the same amount of time. And, as mentioned above, I'm now addicted to TikTok for mindless entertainment or just time-killing.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 8:53 AM on October 26, 2022 [11 favorites]

https://nitter.it/ is a decent method to share tweets and the default interface looks up a single account's timeline.
posted by zenon at 8:55 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

I use Twitter the same basic way I've always done since 2007: to keep tabs on what people I like are doing and saying. I follow 89 accounts. Some of them are people I know IRL. Some are Internet Friends. Some are just creators I like. I don't follow any news accounts, politicians, or the like. I also force Twitter to use the Chronological Timeline. My Twitter experience is pretty decent. Usually entertaining. That's really all I ever wanted out of Twitter.

If I want news, I'll go to a news source. If I want commentary, I'll go into the comments on MetaFilter or Reddit. Twitter is not where I go for those things. It's where I go to see status updates from people I follow. This was the original use case for Twitter, and it still should be... but there's no money or growth in that. The blame for the current state of Twitter falls on the original sin of it going from a simple status update platform to something that needs Engagement At All Costs. That's Capitalism's fault in the end, but Twitter can still be used in a way that isn't stressful, but fun, if you're willing to pare back from following news and influencers and clickbait and focus on following real people and things that you enjoy seeing, not things you follow because you feel you have to.
posted by SansPoint at 9:10 AM on October 26, 2022 [14 favorites]

1-2 days ago, a woman with around 10k followers made a completely innocuous post about enjoying spending a few hours in the mornings with her husband enjoying coffee and chatting. She got dogpiled by users for daring to enjoy a life that sounds only luxurious compared to the complete misery others find themselves in.

explosion, that whole mess really bottom-lined it for me, even though there was already a counter-reaction going by the time I was aware of it.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:11 AM on October 26, 2022 [7 favorites]

If Musk buys Twitter, I am absolutely going to stop using it. I’m not an influencer, nor someone even remotely important, but I am so outta there.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 9:15 AM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Before I deleted TikTok I would regularly spend more than an hour in the evening scrolling through videos, like flipping through channels used to be. I deleted it one day after realizing how much time I was wasting on it, and weirdly: I have not missed it at ALL. Never had the urge to reinstall even once, and this was months ago.

Whereas I've tried to quit Twitter many times and I keep getting pulled back in. I like people being witty and fun pictures that people share and even watching the occasional good argument.

But the ratio of fun stuff to anger inducing and depressing stuff is way off. It's terrible for my mood, with people posting angry/depressing clickbait, active misinformation, and the worst possible takes based on the worst possible readings of what everyone else is saying.

I am currently signed out on my phone and trying to see how long I can avoid signing back in. I did try to sign in once earlier this week, immediately saw a depressing news article being shared, and bounced back out. I don't need this in my life.
posted by JDHarper at 9:17 AM on October 26, 2022 [6 favorites]

I've mostly trimmed twitter usage down to an hour or two a week, if that, thanks to a couple of helpful things.

One was a suggestion, I think from here, that was "unfollow anyone you do not know in real life, or do not actively interact with on twitter." That means celeb accounts, news accounts, political accounts. Just people you are friends or like to hear from/about. In my case, I kept most of my mutuals, some nice art accounts, and people I know/interact with.

Second, if it sucks, hit da bricks. This one is more recent from Tumblr (the advice, not the meme), but the long and short is: you are under no obligation to follow anyone. If you don't like them, unfollow them. Just don't like their content? Unfollow them! Too annoying? Block them. Do they make you unhappy? Block them! You can leave! Just walk out!

Third, Tweak New Twitter. This does several things, but most importantly, it separates tweets made by people you follow and retweets into two different feeds. It cuts out algorithmic content, keeps you on the chronological timeline, hides a bunch of the sidebar stuff, like trending topics, and a bunch more. This has made Twitter a lot more bearable.

This has helped so much. It's amazing when I load up a bunch of tweets and only a few actually come through, the rest of the retweets and quote tweets shuffled off to a different, not visible tab. After a refresh or two, when the slot machine stops producing, you'll realize you're free to go do anything else!
posted by gc at 9:23 AM on October 26, 2022 [18 favorites]

I've barely used Twitter since they got serious about trying to monetize the platform (so…10 years?). There are a few hemi-semi-demi-celebrities who seemingly can be reached on Twitter but not through other means, and I have used it for that a few times. I have discovered that Metafilter's own Charlie Stross is a frequent poster on Twitter, and he's always interesting.

But when Musk takes over, I'm out. I'm still on FB—it has certain uses in my current volunteer, and I do get some personal benefit out of being on it, but: also very evil. When that volunteer role ends, I'm out of there too. I'm on Mastodon. Maybe I'll start using that more.
posted by adamrice at 9:25 AM on October 26, 2022

I use twitter to find things out.

My issue with twitter is less the people on it and their availability and much more the format and interface. Reading tweet chains in the multiple dozens long, and having to unroll timelines backward is ridiculous. It feels like getting a news story delivered by crossword. I continue to bounce hard off of twitter simply because of the interface.

I really, really hope Substack continues to grow. It's a much better medium for the larger-than-120-characters messages.

Interface is why I find Facebook so viscerally repellant too. In contrast, ease of use is why I think YouTube and TikTok dominate the social media heap so hard right now.
posted by bonehead at 9:26 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

Oh gosh, I am the opposite. Twitter's interface is basically the only thing I'm capable of focusing on anymore.
posted by bleep at 9:30 AM on October 26, 2022 [7 favorites]

I'm definitely a very heavy Twitter user - been on since 2009 and have about 2100 followers and 75K tweets over that time - but I am leaning toward quitting too. I'm currently on hiatus with a protected account.

Twitter's moderation being absolute garbage is the main motivator for me to leave; in my city, we recently had municipal election and one of the top contenders for mayor was a non-binary person - one who was a city councillor who had made a name for themselves during a major anti-pandemic measures occupation of the city and thus had also attracted the attention of the hate-mongers on Twitter. Throughout the campaign, the amount of hate they'd get that was clearly against the Twitter standards was ridiculous, but I would report it and get that "Gee whiz, we're real sorry but this is totally fine" email from Twitter over and over and over again.

That all is really just a symptom of the disease that is Twitter and social media in general, directly contributing to the downfall of western democracies. If Musk completes the deal to buy Twitter, I'm out for good. No hecking way.
posted by urbanlenny at 9:32 AM on October 26, 2022 [6 favorites]

I keep my tweets fairly innocuous but one related to being a Caucasian ordering spicy Thai food did recently land me in twitter jail. If "go ahead and hurt Whitey" is what got the moderators' attention and not . . . you know, everything else that makes it through moderation, I'm feeling a little dirtier just keeping the account.

At least now I know how to go down in flames when it's time to go.
posted by whuppy at 9:46 AM on October 26, 2022 [7 favorites]

Before I deleted TikTok I would regularly spend more than an hour in the evening scrolling through videos, like flipping through channels used to be. I deleted it one day after realizing how much time I was wasting on it, and weirdly: I have not missed it at ALL. Never had the urge to reinstall even once, and this was months ago.

What do you expect me to do, be alone with my own thoughts? No thank you.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 9:47 AM on October 26, 2022 [18 favorites]

If Twitter destroys western democracy, I'm out for good. No hecking way.
posted by ryanrs at 9:57 AM on October 26, 2022 [5 favorites]

I quit Twitter when Musk first threatened to buy it. There were some good scientists and comedians and journalists on there, but it wasn't really less toxic than Facebook. Social media is poison.
posted by rikschell at 10:12 AM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

What’s happening?
posted by sjswitzer at 10:28 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

I mass-deleted all my tweets in 2018 after realizing my relationship with Twitter wasn't healthy, but I kept my account alive basically just to squat on it. I've sporadically used it since then, so there were a couple hundred tweets to delete this weekend when I thought about it. What I find most remarkable is that even in my "not really an active user" phase of late I might still have been what Twitter called a "heavy tweeter."

The Twitter-sized hole in my life is mostly for jokes that nobody else will laugh at, so I probably won't replace it.
posted by fedward at 10:55 AM on October 26, 2022

Twitter threads on here always surprise me with their negativity. Maybe I'm one of the few who will actually miss it?

I started on it by following authors; people I loved to read.. because I wanted to see what they were thinking about and find out when new books were coming out. And sometimes they would like a reply I made to them, which was awesome.

My follow list expanded from there. One author liked a funny blog post by a woman who had a weird horse. I followed her, and she talks about her life in an entertaining way, and it's great. Almost all my follows are like that..one cool person led me to another.

I follow some local journalists. Local activists.

When my daughter came out, I started looking for trans women.

When BLM was happening I started following a lot more activists of color.

One lady I followed for her prochoice work was also disabled, and so I found a lot of disability activists.

All of this has helped me learn so much I never would, and find out about so many cool people. I have a really rich network that I plug into every day that feeds my brain and soul.

I have no idea how many followers I have. Who cares.

And yes the moderation sucks and if Musk takes over, I'll have to leave because it will get bad fast.

But it has been a good thing in my life and I will miss it.
posted by emjaybee at 11:00 AM on October 26, 2022 [34 favorites]

All of that sounds great, emjaybee, but also would work with RSS and a bunch of not-centralized variously-monetized posting platforms, yesno?
posted by clew at 11:18 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

Me and my online friends/hobby groups prefer Discord because it offers more privacy (socially, not data-wise). Each server has its own rules and norms, and most crucially allows for users to shape and moderate their own space. Dealing with bad actors is much easier in a small setting; the ones who get in will be kicked out by the mods, and bots/brigades can be automatically caught by measures as strict as you'd like to set up.

I think that ability to moderate and protect your space is also why many streamers and e-celebs are moving to Discord. Not to mention that Discord has much more personalisation - it supports custom emotes and stickers, which are a huge part of streaming culture (as well as a cool and fun thing to represent in jokes with friends), and you can split discussion into channels so that people can more easily view what they want.

On Twitter, that creativity is stifled because everyone's scared of a troll happening across their tweet and launching a site-wide campaign to harass them, and there's nothing they can do to help themselves if that happens.
posted by wandering zinnia at 11:21 AM on October 26, 2022 [4 favorites]

Twitter threads on here always surprise me with their negativity.

I think there were a lot of us who thrived on Twitter when its lack of structure and moderation seemed like benign neglect, and we could just fool around with our friends and invent structures within the form. As it aged and grew it came to seem more structured and less spontaneous, and the lack of moderation metastasized into something that allowed the worst sort of abuse and brigading. Every now and then there would be some half-assed mea culpa from @jack about how moderation was hard and they realized they needed to do better, but then no real change would happen. The longer that situation lasted, the more @jack apologized-but-didn't while also trying to beat the "free speech" drum, the more it seemed like the worst excesses were intended to be the point. It became difficult to have the fun we used to have and people started backing away.

If Twitter had ever been serious about fixing abuse problems, it stands to reason that something might actually have improved by 2018 (when I gave up). By the time they got around to banning some of the big spreaders of disinformation and hate, it was well past too late to reverse the trend. I'm glad you're still finding value in it and that there are still voices worth seeking out, but to me active participation seemed to carry too much risk, and be too fatiguing, to keep up.
posted by fedward at 11:27 AM on October 26, 2022 [8 favorites]

> clew: "All of that sounds great, emjaybee, but also would work with RSS and a bunch of not-centralized variously-monetized posting platforms, yesno?"

Back when Google Reader was shutting down, I believe there was a small window of time where Twitter could have decided to basically become the new Reader. Of course, there was basically zero chance of this happening given everything we know about Twitter as a company and how they understand their product. After all, they're the ones who shut down Vine in order to keep Periscope. What's Periscope?. Exactly.
posted by mhum at 11:31 AM on October 26, 2022 [10 favorites]

I love it for the same reasons emjaybee does - and have made many of my closest friends both IRL and online there and have a huge extended community through it - but the fact is that all of those groups of people many of us are learning a lot from - BLM activists, BIPOC in general, trans people, women, even journalists, given the anti-media stance common on the more extreme right - are being subjected to unimaginable hate, so with Twitter's poor moderation they are having to withstand incredible psychic and emotional damage. This is the intention of the hatemongers inflicting said damage - to silence those groups of people through constant, constant abuse.
posted by urbanlenny at 11:32 AM on October 26, 2022 [6 favorites]

But Twitter and TikTok aren't even kind of doing the same thing.

At a 10,000 foot level "social media" is a pretty apt description for what they both do. People have a need to connect with their social group online, and while the actual mechanism has seen various models come and go the basic model remains the same: offer people a limited human connection and profit off it.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:34 AM on October 26, 2022

fedward: Agreed on all points. The time for Twitter to have done anything about those systemic issues was during GamerGate, or arguably even earlier, like during Operation Lollipop. So much of Twitter’s damage has been self-inflicted due to a mix of ideological stupidity, the demands of being a public ally traded company/venture-backed startup, and Capitalism In General, but it feels like their self-inflicted injuries are the most damning.
posted by SansPoint at 11:35 AM on October 26, 2022 [6 favorites]

Ryan Broderick's Garbage Day substack: Someday soon, you will tweet for the last time
posted by box at 11:42 AM on October 26, 2022 [4 favorites]

I guess what I want to know is that if you are savvy and able enough to find your replacement Twitter, how do you help the kind of folks emjaybee listed above? Despite the mountains of hate, Twitter is where the marginalized gather to exchange information about activism/information etc. It feels very...white to assume to that people can rebuild the communities they have so long built up on a platform. Is it great that Twitter has become that platform and will likely ruin it if Musk takes over? No, not at all, but it's a big ask for those folks to rebuild their communities on a replacement site or app that might not be the solution. Like, I can shutter my account and head over to other places because my main interests are pretty easy to find in other spaces.
posted by Kitteh at 11:55 AM on October 26, 2022 [6 favorites]

So Twitter is trending toward porn and gambling? It's like IRC is reborn.

I will miss the journalists and AI bots, and the few niche hobbyists that got fed up with other platforms. Not sure where the latter will end up, some will likely disappear online.

What I worry about is blog traffic and web health in general -- Twitter is one of the few services that encourages out-linking, and one of the main drivers of web traffic besides search.
posted by credulous at 11:56 AM on October 26, 2022 [6 favorites]

At a 10,000 foot level "social media" is a pretty apt description for what they both do.

From a different 10,000 foot level, what they both do is sell advertising. What Twitter seems to be worried about in the article is losing its position as a preferred broadcaster for the stars who bring in the most advertising dollars.
posted by clawsoon at 11:58 AM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yeah. Part of the problem is that most social media platform's business model and the value its users get out of it are largely unrelated to one another. Tumblr, unexpectedly, is doing better on that front lately - turns out when you offer weirdos the chance to blast their own weird posts to a big audience for $5, people will find it incredibly amusing to do so.
posted by restless_nomad at 12:00 PM on October 26, 2022 [9 favorites]

turns out when you offer weirdos the chance to blast their own weird posts to a big audience for $5, people will find it incredibly amusing to do so.
posted by restless_nomad at 2:00 PM on October 26 [+] [!]

Don't forget paying to give people crabs
posted by gc at 12:04 PM on October 26, 2022 [3 favorites]

Before I deleted TikTok I would regularly spend more than an hour in the evening scrolling through videos, like flipping through channels used to be. I deleted it one day after realizing how much time I was wasting on it, and weirdly: I have not missed it at ALL. Never had the urge to reinstall even once, and this was months ago.

What do you expect me to do, be alone with my own thoughts? No thank you.

I know this is (kind of not really) a joke, but this. Also, TikTok's algorithm is amazingly (frighteningly) specific and I can't tell you how much free therapy I've gotten off of it, simply because I need therapy. Twitter is kind of the opposite of therapy.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 12:06 PM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

I went from being a heavy (daily+) Twitter poster to absolutely zero posts whatsoever during the He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named years, so as to not attract hate swarms, and now operate a sock puppet for the sole purpose of following art and clothing accounts that I want to see timely updates from. It's a nice enough RSS reader in a third-party app, but honestly I wish they'd just use email newsletters.
posted by Callisto Prime at 12:28 PM on October 26, 2022

turns out when you offer weirdos the chance to blast their own weird posts to a big audience for $5, people will find it incredibly amusing to do so.

I have seen SO MANY GOOD PICTURES OF PEOPLE'S CATS since Tumblr made that particular change. Once I forgot to tell someone how cute their cat Chelly was and then I lost the post and went off rambling about it during a broader discussion of the new Blaze feature. Months later they took the time to hunt me down and tell me that it made their day and show me the original post again, and that made my day and it was just cats all the way down.

I also appreciate that the Blaze FAQ includes "Can I choose who is going to see my post?" and clearly notes that, uh, you can choose Anyone or you can pick one of seven specific countries if you want. Everything else is up to random chance. Beautiful.

And of course, they promote Blaze by pointing out that you can use it to get rid of the terrifying Pikachu man, which is an A+ internet experience in its own right.
posted by sciatrix at 12:44 PM on October 26, 2022 [8 favorites]

I guess what I want to know is that if you are savvy and able enough to find your replacement Twitter, how do you help the kind of folks emjaybee listed above?

The sad thing is, I'm not replacing Twitter with anything. I'm making more use of group texts than I used to, but that's just a small echo chamber of known friends. And yes, I know that's a problem.
posted by fedward at 12:51 PM on October 26, 2022

Today Elon has made the trek to visit Twitter HQ; what's there now since most Twitter employees don't have to go to the office ever again, is ambiguous. True to form he's also posting about media's "establishment bias", "citizen journalism", and the radical power of the... New York Times.
posted by meowzilla at 1:12 PM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm old so a lot of this is at right angles to me. But so far I haven't seen anyone mention (what I think) a large issue in these things. People complain how the different media deteriorated over time. And the basic pattern of...

subsidize a community =>
grow it over time to something =>
monetize it

...seems to be a large part of the behavior being complained about. Or maybe the complaints are just about how *fast* the monetizing process is going?

Having a place for community would *need* to be subsidized. Or paid for by the users.

You could imagine a different kind of "bootstrapping" where the community gradually reduced its fees by growing over time and letting scale do its thing. But that's not the usual Business Model. Though that is the basic Public with a capital P Model.
posted by aleph at 1:21 PM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

We should start aping Pinboard/idlewords and start celebrating and burying these upstart websites.
posted by zenon at 1:30 PM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Having a place for community would *need* to be subsidized. Or paid for by the users.

Twitch appears to be creating communities paid for by members that are centered around charismatic individuals, like some sort of Pentecostal church with Jesus replaced by video games.
posted by clawsoon at 1:38 PM on October 26, 2022 [5 favorites]

Twitter's value is tied to ease of use; most people don't know what an RSS feed means, or are willing to join multiple discords or Mastodon instances. Blogs and newsletters are great, but don't allow for the joy of random shit posting, snark and weirdness that some of us love.

Tumblr is probably the closest but it's slightly more work to use and less useful in a general-interest sense.

I mean, it won't kill me or anything but there isn't anything that will easily fill the same role.
posted by emjaybee at 1:52 PM on October 26, 2022 [12 favorites]

Elon is walking around the Twitter HQ carrying an actual physical Sink fixture.

What a collosal dumb ass

"Let That Sink In" is apparently the joke.

This Twonk is an actual Billionaire. ::Facelm::
posted by Faintdreams at 2:10 PM on October 26, 2022 [5 favorites]

I will miss Twitter too. Like emjaybee, I have a community there - many, if not most, of them came from Mefi originally. By the standards in TFA, I'm a heavy user - 4 - 5 tweets in a week? easily, probably more - but I have around 750 followers, a number which has remained basically stable for over a decade, and that's plenty. I have heard that going over 1000 is what brings down the troll armies: I've only ever had the odd isolated troll, easy to block and ignore. This is, I recognize, one of the privileges of being an old lady. Nobody cares what I say or do anymore and that can be liberating as hell. I am not interesting, phew.

Meanwhile, I follow authors and artists and activists and I learn something from all of them. I follow some art bots, some just straight up weirdness, some random comedians, people who post dad jokes, people who post snarky one liners, people who post political rants, people who seem interesting and know things I don't. It's chaotic, infuriating and delightful and it's been a huge part of my life for a long time now. I feel it's made me more informed, more media literate, smarter in general. OK it probably also killed my attention span, but, well. I am going to miss the hell out of it when the muskrat kills it stone dead and I don't know, exactly, where I will go next.
posted by mygothlaundry at 2:10 PM on October 26, 2022 [9 favorites]

"Twitter's value is tied to ease of use;"

Yep. Both Twitter *and* Facebook. This was around before but these two (and others) made it so easy. And therefore got a lot more people sharing/connecting => making stuff => etc.

You can make the argument that now that the communities are built a lot of them will sustain a move to other platforms. Could be...
posted by aleph at 2:19 PM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

What a collosal dumb ass

Expect the dumb-assery to increase as we approach his Friday deadline.
posted by ryanrs at 2:52 PM on October 26, 2022 [5 favorites]

We should start aping Pinboard/idlewords and start celebrating and burying these upstart websites.

Except Pinboard is being allowed to rot in place. Hasn't had a new feature in a decade, and has had several regressions. It's frustrating, because I'm heavily dependent on it professionally. At least I can take frequent backups, just in case it collapses.
posted by humbug at 3:39 PM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

Having a place for community would *need* to be subsidized. Or paid for by the users.

See also: Metafilter Wants You
posted by chavenet at 3:42 PM on October 26, 2022 [5 favorites]

It is fascinating to see how much people's lives are caught up, engaged, invested in social media and happily enough it seems, judging from this thread. Makes me feel like a visitor from outer space. I know what FB is of course, Instagram too, TikTok I looked at once and left bewildered, Twitter is another mystery to me. I have never had an account on any of them. I don't use any of them. I never really understood the appeal of any of it. References to 'para social relationships' have me scratching my head. What on earth might that be?

There is no judgement in any of this - bewilderment yes, judgement no. Actually, maybe that is not true. I just asked myself so what's the appeal of Metafilter? I think it's because on balance, it's just about weighted in favour of knowledge over opinion. That's some sort of judgement I suppose. I am obsessed with knowledge, with learning, with what once you could call with a straight face, "the pursuit of truth." But opinion, oh gosh no thank you. Not even my own.. in which case I should probably shut up right now.
posted by dutchrick at 3:45 PM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

We should start aping Pinboard

And take a year off Twitter? Not a bad idea.
posted by credulous at 3:46 PM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Twitter’s power users — which are defined as people who log in almost daily and tweet more than 3 times a week

this makes me a "power user" of Twitter, which believe you me is ridiculous
posted by chavenet at 3:51 PM on October 26, 2022 [9 favorites]

If you only want to use Twitter catch up on what certain accounts are posting, then try using Nitter

Just replace twitter.com in any URL with nitter.net

You'll be given a full view of the account with no ads, no tracking, and no annoying pop ups asking you to sign up to see more. And you can even grab an RSS feed for the account - all without actually visiting Twitter.
posted by wandering zinnia at 3:54 PM on October 26, 2022 [3 favorites]

"Muskrat?" I love it. Let's use it.

"I never really understood the appeal of any of it. References to 'para social relationships' have me scratching my head. What on earth might that be? "

Think of it this way: literally every single person you know IRL/online now reads every single thing you've ever posted very quickly. And gets offended about it. And may dox/stalk/death threat you for it.

Parasocial relationships are like with famous people: we all know what Elon's up to lately, but does Elon know what's up with YOU lately? It's a one-sided fan relationship.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:02 PM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

"Ease of use" is what killed Facebook for me. Half formed thought? Post it. News article where you've only read the headline? Share it. Took a bunch of photos on vacation? Dump them all in an unorganized album. Facebook wants you to do and share everything in Facebook, which ironically made it worse.

Twitter's character limit and Instagram's photo requirement somehow made them both slightly more palatable, in completely opposite ways, by adding small speedbumps.
posted by meowzilla at 5:21 PM on October 26, 2022

There is also a nitter browser plugin that will automatically transform all twitter links into nitter links: Firefox Chrome
posted by meowzilla at 5:24 PM on October 26, 2022 [5 favorites]

Like emjaybee, mygothlaundry, Kitteh, and others, I'm a Twitter aficionado. I'm still vainly praying for a deus ex machina to smite the Musk deal. It will be a tough detox for me, I am a frequent user but I am not a fan of the new tycoon and do not expect good things. I may keep it as a passive news feed for awhile but stop interacting while I patch together some type of replacement probably involving RSS. I resent that social media gutted blogs and private sites and now we will just have a few billionaires running crappy things and dominating the public square.

I will sorely miss the Twitter people who provided therapy and hilarity during my frequent bouts of despair with 3 am Trumpsomnia; and the people who got me through the nearly two years of pandemic solitude. Their wit and wisdom has entertained me, educated me, and exposed me to so many new and fascinating things.

I get why many don't care for it, but the firehose and random nature of Twitter has always appealed to me. I'm a news junkie and there is nothing quite like it when there is breaking news, it's one of the things I like best. Not just the news from journalists, but also access to people local to breaking events. Over the years, I've cultivated an eclectic array of interesting people to follow, and it's paid off. I follow mefites, musicians, scientists, reporters, authors, artists, activists, a few select celebrities, local stuff, and random people I've stumbled on. I like following people who are way out of my immediate circle, the instant translation allows a wide geography. I've also created several topical lists - one of my favorites being small farms and animal sanctuaries. A clip of gamboling baby sheep can be a great way to start the day or a good mood changer!

I haven't run into much in the way of trolls or nastiness, but then again, I am small potatoes and actively avoid engaging with people who want to argue. I use the block and mute buttons liberally.

It was a good run, but on the internet, all good things pass. Sigh.
posted by madamjujujive at 7:16 PM on October 26, 2022 [9 favorites]

Of course, I still miss del.icio.us. And Memepool. And Robot Wisdom.
posted by madamjujujive at 7:33 PM on October 26, 2022 [9 favorites]

I use Twitter mostly as a news and utility feed. I've made stabs at actually trying to use it as social media but even after having an account for 14 years, my tweets get very little engagement.
posted by octothorpe at 7:52 PM on October 26, 2022 [3 favorites]

Also a fan of Twitter, clew had a surprisingly apt point in comparing it to Reader. I think I joined Twitter not long after the demise of Reader and it fills a very similar space for me that other replacements like The Old Reader do not. I don't find myself needing RSS feeds where I am not able to broadcast my own comments on the things I see and to read comments from people I am parasocially attached to about things they see. Twitter did what Google did in that case, and kind of what Metafilter does as well, it provided a network of people with whom I could interact about various subjects.

I am in the denial phase of grief on Twitter's impending demise. I hate videos as content so all the new platforms don't really work for me. But also it has felt like a lot of the things I liked about Twitter have kind of stopped being there anyway so maybe it won't be so bad to just not have it.
posted by Nec_variat_lux_fracta_colorem at 8:09 PM on October 26, 2022 [9 favorites]

I'm a teacher; I mostly use twitter to keep current on my subjects (and fine, also the occasional doom-scrolling, which is however usually also somewhat related to my subjects). I mostly follow journalists and academics. I have some slightly parasocial relationships with some other users, in the sense that they sometimes post a bit more personal stuff, and I might sometimes like the more personal tweets. I don't generally interact much with anyone. Sometimes I feel tempted to get drawn into an argument and I might even type a response, but I'm getting better and better at immediately deleting these comments again.

I find that different social platforms have very different uses for me. Facebook is/used to be for family and friends, tumblr is for hobbies/special interests and twitter is for work/current issues. (Insta and tik-tok are non-starters for me, because I'm just not a very visual person - I tend to find pictures dull and I hate video). Groupchats have been a decent replacement for facebook, in terms of interacting with family and friends, but I would find it a lot harder to replace tumblr (which I hopefully won't have to any time soon; I envision it just like metafilter as my eventual online-retirement home) and twitter.

For me, it all comes down to weak ties vs strong ties. Groupchats, discord, mastodon, etc. are good (actually, better) solutions for people you have strong ties with, people who don't just know you, but also each other. But I highly value weak ties too; strong ties provide comfort and safety, weak ties broaden the horizons. And weak ties can't be maintained via group chat - there's no group. My parasocial relationships on tumblr and twitter are too low-key to maintain via individual corrsepondence.

I've started to subscribe to more newsletters in preparation of the demise of twitter, but it's not an ideal replacement either. Because I want to read some comments. Not general comments, as you would find in a more or less free-for-all comment section (Metafilter remains the only place on the internet for me, where I get some benefit out of reading general comments) - but comments by people I've decided to follow, because they so far have a good track-record of having plausible takes. Sometimes it's vital to get that additional context. The most recent example would be that article accusing Sacheen Littlefeather of being a pretendian - without twitter comments, I wouldn't have known that the journalist responsible was a controversial figure herself, with a questionable agenda.

Metafilter is still often a good place for me to get that vital context, but content on Metafilter is dwindling too. Maybe it's all an inevitable byproduct of aging - the young people want to be where the old people aren't - but I still feel slightly too young to age out of public life.
posted by sohalt at 1:27 AM on October 27, 2022 [13 favorites]

Elon is walking around the Twitter HQ carrying an actual physical Sink fixture.

What a collosal dumb ass

"Let That Sink In" is apparently the joke.

He should have shown up dressed up as a vampire, for which he is absolutely a natural, stood at the closest approximation to a threshold he could find, and then told select members of the Board assembled for the purpose to invite him in.
posted by jamjam at 1:58 AM on October 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

References to 'para social relationships' have me scratching my head. What on earth might that be? "

Twitter, like a lot of social media is built around one-way relationships - following someone does not oblige them to follow you back. Following someone means that you get to see all of what they choose to post, and it is easy to feel like you know the person, particularly people who are more likely to post more personal stuff.(It is also easy to forget that you are only seeing what they choose to post - you aren't seeing the whole person.) So you end up with this one sided relationship as they are not aware of you at all, except as one of their mass of followers.

In the worst cases you end up with people being abused,stalked and doxed, as they either didn't match up to their followers' idea of who they were and "disappointed" them, or a follower took some sort of interaction (a like of a funny reply, a retweet of something, etc.) as a sign that they really *were* friends. But I think a lot of people have at least a milder form, just simply from being so familiar with the person you're following that it "feels" like you know.

I do hink some of the other platforms are even worse than Twitter for encouraging parasocial relationships, particularly Twitch, Instagram and YouTube - and it's at the heart of most of Influencers relationships with their fans.

(I will admit to having a parasocial relation with several cats on the internet, that I have never met and will never meet, but still know almost everything about.)
posted by scorbet at 2:49 AM on October 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

A brief shock: without going into great details, I got a message back on Twitter yesterday that the account of a clearly bad person that I had reported on was now locked.

Not sure if I should be happy for this isolated victory, or continue to emphasize the dozens of times that reporting had no effect. Probably the latter.

Facebook's record in this area remains zero to umptybajillion.
posted by gimonca at 3:14 AM on October 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

I found that the trick to politics on twitter is to follow local journalists. The national news will find you just fine on it's own. I follow maybe two or three people who mostly cover politics at the national level, but a bunch of local journalists and politicians.

Like many people here, none of the commonly proposed replacements suit me. Tiktok puts me off for the video and the algorithmic nature of it. Discord is chat, and chat is an entirely different thing from posting. Mastodon doesn't have the communities of journalists that I want to follow.

I was active on livejournal until about 2012. I'll probably be on twitter for a while. I've never used it as a platform for interacting with anyone other than my actual friends, and I've got a grand total of 84 followers after 15 years of being on the platform, so I don't see much of the abuse that the platform is known for.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 4:03 AM on October 27, 2022 [6 favorites]

I left Twitter about 2 years back cold turkey. Just struggled with my usage of it (time-waster, easy distraction, made me mad) and the incessant badness of the way so many people ended up using it – the abuse on the platform, the pure hatred. I haven't found anything that's a replacement for the good part of it. I still peek in on a few people whose handles I remember, via Nitter (the non-logged in Twitter experience on the web is hilariously gated – not Facebook/Instagram levels, but close. Try it!)

This is, as the article suggests, a lifecycle shift over to other platforms for a lot of people.

One last note on this. I was going to chastise some of the writers of news articles I've read over the past several years that are tantamount to quoting 5-7 tweets, saying "People are upset about [hot topic], here are a few tweets" and calling it an article. But it plays into something bigger at least here in the US, I think: the lack of a single, dependable national media channel. Everything is super fragmented now! There's still broadcast TV, of course, but that doesn't reach everyone anymore. Cable TV is in that boat too. So what does? There isn't a perfect replacement but I suspect the media latched on to Twitter because it was the closest thing – closer than Facebook maybe – to providing this. (It's also why, I think, the media still talks about SNL every week like it's an amazing thing; it's more that there isn't anything else with such a reach that a lot of people can still watch or agree on or dissect.)

That may give Twitter legs for the near-term. Naturally, it's just as easy to spread rampant disinformation and misinformation that way.
posted by hijinx at 5:25 AM on October 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

I've been moving TO twitter lately; Facebook had been my go-to for scrolling neat things because it showed me my friend's posts and posts from groups and pages I follow. I had curated my feed to just what I want to see, and if I followed anything new it's because someone whose opinion I already value has recommended it to me.

About a month ago, "Suggested For You" has taken over Facebook. It's a firehose of stuff I never asked to see, and most of it are low-value memes that pretty much make me angry that I'm showed this instead of my cousins or the Victorian Houses group or the street art page or any of the other curated things I asked for. I hit the little 'x' to say I don't want to see more of this; if somebody/something shows up multiple times I block them, but there's so much that there's no stemming the tidal wave. Millions of identical "I post star wars memes" pages that Facebook seems to think I want to see even though they're universally unbelievably stupid. Game of Thrones over and over even though I have never seen it and don't have any interest in it.

Yesterday I literally saw the same four or five Facebook posts from friends that had been posted days earlier, but nothing new from anyone I deliberately followed despite digging and seeing that there had been a lot of new content from those I follow. I don't know how to make the algorithm understand I already see what I want, and they're making me use Facebook less.

Twitter at least lets me see the posts from the 90 or so people/things I follow without hijacking it with the algorithm. Unfortunately there's no family/close friends on their sharing their life on twitter, so I need to keep Facebook around for now.

Instagram has always been like Facebook is for me now -- very little "I choose to see this" content and all algorithm. I tried, but there's nothing of value there. A picture with minimal context is sort of fun, but it's not something I can scroll through for any amount of time.

Another drawback for me and modern social media is that I don't do video. Video takes. sooooo.. LONG....to get to a point. Let me read the transcript and get the content in 30 seconds instead of wasting two minutes. I literally cannot do TikTok. It just doesn't work for me.

I don't mean to be "old man yelling at clouds" but I've been a heavy internet user since the early nineties, and social media is really making me step away from the internet. Not because of trolls or ruining democracy or anything, but it's garbage, piles and piles of wasted space.
posted by AzraelBrown at 7:11 AM on October 27, 2022 [14 favorites]

Twitter is where I go for breaking news, more or less. The alternative for me, is just to rely on trade press for work and BBC/Guardian/Sky or whatever for general news. I mean, that's fine but it would be a retrograde step. I'll be joining whatever primarily text-based social media thing that offers this kind of thing in the future. Twitter is just the current platform.
posted by plonkee at 7:19 AM on October 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

welp.

I just signed out of twitter.
posted by zenon at 7:22 AM on October 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

From the related posts links below the comment box.

A Eulogy For Twitter (2014)
posted by COD at 8:26 AM on October 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

About a month ago, "Suggested For You" has taken over Facebook.

Somehow, my behavior on Facebook has created an algorithm where nearly all the "Suggested For You" posts it sends me are pictures of Debbie Harry, and so far I'm OK with it.
posted by Devoidoid at 9:38 AM on October 27, 2022 [6 favorites]

Ol' Elon's posted a note -- in the form of embedded images of giant blocks of text with no alt text, natch -- to advertisers on his brand-new (well, slightly used) platform (any typos mine) :

I wanted to reach out personally to share my motivation in acquiring Twitter. There has been much speculation about why I bought Twitter and what I think about advertising. Most of it has been wrong.

The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence. There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.

In the relentless pursuit of clicks, much of traditional media has fueled and catered to those polarized extremes, as they believe that is what brings in the money, but, in doing so, the opportunity for dialogue is lost.

That is why I bought Twitter. I didn't do it because it would be easy. I didn't do it to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love. And I do so with humility, recognizing that failure in pursuing this goal, despite our best efforts, is a very real possibility.

That said, Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences! In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all, where you can choose your desired experience according to your preferences, just as you can choose, for example, to see movies or play video games ranging from all ages to mature.

I also very much believe that advertising, when done right, can delight, entertain and inform you; it can show you a service or product or medical treatment that you never knew existed, but is right for you. For this to be true, it is essential to show Twitter users advertising that is as relevant as possible to their needs. Low relevancy ads are spam, but highly relevant ads are actually content!

Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise. To everyone who has partnered with us, I thank you. Let us build something extraordinary together.

I'd like to point out the irony of claiming that you didn't buy Twitter to make money within a not-at-all-desperate-sounding message aimed towards advertisers. Also, lol at "highly relevant ads are actually content!"

Anyways, here's hoping that the free-for-all hellscape doesn't end up destroying us all.
posted by mhum at 9:44 AM on October 27, 2022 [7 favorites]

I'm gonna echo what some others have said and I think some sort of cobbled-together mess of Mefi + RSS + Discord + newsletters is going to have to do for the time being, and maybe my mental health will actually be better off. I'm actually looking forward to spending more time back here on the blue. Though there's some things that Twitter is great at and I don't know of good replacements for... artists with no off-Twitter web presence besides a long-dormant Artstation account, or aging musicians who I love but are definitely not really visible out there otherwise, or the Weird Twitter freaks. There's not really a good replacement for the carefully-curated list of weirdos I've put together.
posted by 40 Watt at 10:33 AM on October 27, 2022 [4 favorites]

IMHO Twitter's driving people away at all levels, all my artist friends are real sick of the algorithm loving to hide tweets with offsite links and words like "commissions" or "patreon". Seriously all my friends who look at their analytics on a regular basis see a *lot* fewer views of tweets that meet those criteria.
posted by egypturnash at 4:34 PM on October 27, 2022 [4 favorites]

Wait, Fetlife is dead?

I miss websites. I miss visiting a bunch of sites every day.
posted by pelvicsorcery at 4:35 PM on October 27, 2022 [6 favorites]

Somehow, my behavior on Facebook has created an algorithm where nearly all the "Suggested For You" posts it sends me are pictures of Debbie Harry, and so far I'm OK with it.

Same here, except that I'm getting info about Paul Weller.
posted by gimonca at 4:39 AM on October 28, 2022 [2 favorites]