In a post today, Internet Superhero Joe Rosensteel relates his concerns about Twitter:
Twitter has so much on its plate that it continually says it will address, and that once it does it will improve discourse on its site, and safety of people in the world. The longer they take to move on these problems the worse these problems become. When Twitter allows a user to be a bad actor, to gather a following, to get verified, and then be too important to ban, then they create a kind of social technical-debt.
Conversely, when I continue to use Twitter, surrounded by misery and panic over these bad actors, because I’ve invested too much time there, that’s also a kind of debt. Realizing that my retweets of troubling articles mean nothing, and that the caustic, high-speed flow of minor news-fluctuations pumped into my veins doesn’t improve the world.
The whole article is worth a close read, not least for his inspired use of imagery.
On Thursday I left Twitter for good, after a few months of no longer “actively” using the service. What I found is that I wouldn’t post anymore, but I’d still load it up regularly to frantically check for news of the world’s imminent implosion. I’d given up all the good parts of the service and kept the bad.
Well, there’s plenty of more reliable and less toxic places to read bad news in the world. I vastly prefer The Washington Post and The Economist.
I will never forget all the great people I met on Twitter – this blog probably wouldn’t exist without it. But Twitter is no longer the service I joined, and the community I loved is fading away. I look forward to following their adventures elsewhere.
In the meantime you can still find me here, on Instagram, and Micro.blog.