Why I am done with Twitter

When I first registered an account on Twitter, it was the Exciting New Thing.

Facebook had briefly had our attention. I was eighteen when it launched in the UK, with sign-ups limited to those with .ac.uk email addresses. Our parents and younger siblings were locked out. We didn't care if there was the odd shot with nudity or drug use on our walls. The only viewer, outside of our contemporaries, was the little face in the corner. We could live our fantasy lives on there as we worked out what we were doing in the real world.

Every flat, every class, every student society had it's own group. We were all insiders in our own circles. Cool event invites were passed around, along with the coursework answers and the hot gossip. It was a tool that reflected the users for whom it had been designed. It augmented campus life in a way that's almost hard to remember now and likely unimaginable for the undergraduate generations before or since.

Of course this had its downsides. I picked up a stalker who was easily able to find out which parties I was going to, who I knew and eventually where I lived. At the time it all felt like the rough and tumble of adult online life? I don't know how I feel in hindsight. We persisted with it.

Then they did what to us was the unthinkable — opened Facebook.

That feeling of horror when your mum sent you a friend request and you had to go back through *everything* and cleanse your wall of anything that might not be too palatable to those funding your new lifestyle. The fun we had on there died overnight.

But who cares! There's another thing we're all doing now! Twitter.

When I first registered an account on Twitter, there were just hundreds of tweets per hour.

Crazy to look back on, but you could live in the public timeline and do all your interacting there. Who knew who you'd meet and on what hashtag (before Twitter made them a feature, before they sold them to advertisers, before they started turning up elsewhere) and it was always exciting! I chatted with someone about security on Linux systems who'd turned out to have written a DOS game I loved as a child. I argued with someone about anonymity versus privacy who I later found out had made a record with a musical hero of mine.

So that begs the question #wherediditallgowrong

Crime the first. The app developers who had integrated the user-developed features of Twitter which the company itself then followed, were screwed over by the API limit. Their products became barely usable overnight. Twitter addicts had to move to the (frankly rubbish) official app or use Twitter less? A lot of good people that contributed a lot to the early community faded away.

This also buggered up some good stuff people were doing like RSS feedbots for interesting things or interactive bots that did something useful. I had maybe 40 twitterbots myself at some point. It buggered up projects like TTYtter which provided customisable and accessible ways to access the Twitter network. It lost a lot of goodwill.

Crime the second. I don't know how to sum this up succinctly. When that first notification popped up that, instead of bringing your attention to a new reply or follower, just wanted to sell you something? "@somebigcorp just tweeted" or whatever it was. They were emailed to you too. "New from your network - @yourfriend followed @somebrand" etc. They started messing with the timeline chronology just to show more of those too — You might have missed this tweet from @ouradvertiser — just gimme a break!

Crime the third. The Biggie. Twitter did too little, too late when it came to threats and abuse. Frankly, in my eyes, this amounts to passive acceptance that the friendly community had died and it had become a place to hate, to complain, to harass.

#realtalk

In my eyes, continuing to use the services of a business who consistently fail to address the factors that have caused the community changes within their network is tantamount to endorsing their methods. I'm not doing that.

Twitter's audience is shrinking, their money is drying up, the fun is definitely over. I won't miss them but I'll miss the good people I met on here. I'll be abandoning or deleting all of my accounts, whether business, personal, bot or alt. Feel free to join me on Mastodon if you want to see this but done right.