I had four Twitter accounts and a couple of days ago I deactivated them all. I am fully off of Twitter. My main reasons for leaving include:
- Changes in content and sorting which make for a worse experience
- Blue checks galore
- Not a great place to promote
I’ll go into a little detail on each of these reasons.
First, since Elon Musk purchased the platform it looks to me like there is more hate being posted, and less news. Often I would go on Twitter just to see what was going on in the world. But, lately, I’ll go to the news tab and it’s a bunch of random hashtags and some don’t even have to do with news. I also started to notice that whether I followed Elon Musk or not, I would see tweets from him often. Towards the end I remembered I could just mute or block him if I was tired of seeing his tweets, but leaving is better at this point.
The second reason I left Twitter is that now anyone can buy a blue verified checkmark. Just before I deactivated my accounts a famous person tweeted about their anniversary. The replies were a sea of blue check-marked accounts saying mean things. It’s not an environment I want to be a part of anymore. The whole troll thing is very old now. It’s not cute anymore. Instead of continuing to weed out trolls and hate, Musk has given mean people blue checks.
The third reason is that I haven’t found it to be a great place to promote my art or businesses. I’ve had various Twitter accounts over the years almost since Twitter launched. A couple of times I had fairly successful accounts, in my opinion. Small compared to the accounts with millions of followers, but I had 500+ with one account after a year of not posting regularly. Still I didn’t find it to be very enjoyable. And, I don’t think it helped my side project at all. It felt like a job thinking about what to tweet and then I realized it wasn’t doing much good.
Of course, I’ll admit the last paragraph opens me up to potential comments like, “maybe you just aren’t good at social media marketing.” That’s fine, people can think about what they would like. The bottom line is, I didn’t feel like Twitter did much for me, and then Musk made it worse.
I still might want to share short thoughts though. A microblog is still an idea that I love. So, I added the page “activity” here on my blog where I may post short thoughts from time to time.
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