Intention To leave Twitter
I am beginning to feel it is time to leave Twitter. Why?
There’s a point in every social media where it no longer becomes tenable to use it because the costs are far greater than the benefits.
For Facebook, this happened to me in 2015 when I had stopped enjoying the content there and also Facebook was actively trying to kill the open web. Facebook’s decline in usage would point to the idea that I was at the start of the trend towards the decline.
Quora was very interesting at one point in time. Then it became filled with very low quality questions and answers. I stopped using Quora right at the beginning of this trend.
I like to believe that I adopt new technology fairly early. Perhaps it is also true that I leave obsolete technology fairly early!?
To be in the early leavers curve, one must be able to find symptoms of decline from which a platform cannot recover.
I think I’m beginning to find this for Twitter:
- The visibility is skewed towards blue check accounts and accounts with large following.
- Only low quality content (controversial, emotion-provoking, meaningless) get amplified (similar to Quora amplifying cringe-worthy content)
- The ownership of Twitter has been trying to make even more restrictions for regular accounts (to favor blue check accounts)
- The interface doesn’t work for following high volume accounts.
Overall I’m getting a very negative vibe from Twitter these days (the way I used to feel about Facebook in 2014s). So, as in the past, I’ll now be experimenting with quitting. I do this in batches. First I leave for a few weeks, then I come back and see if life was better or worse for the lack of Twitter. Then I take a call on leaving permanently or not.
This is not about Elon Musk or Mastodon. Neither of those are good enough reasons to leave a social media.
It is about the cost-benefit analysis.
I wouldn’t post anything to my Twitter profile alone. Most of the stuff were already written on my blogs and syndicated to Twitter. I still have mastodon and two channels on telegram where you can follow me.