Good Riddance, Twitter

I was looking for an excuse to finally leave Twitter and I think it came to me earlier this month when the Block feature was changed: anyone you blocked can see your profile, but they cannot interact with it.

It’s a horrific breach in privacy, and for me it was the last straw. I was looking for an excuse to finally abandon this damned hellsite, and this was it. Any previous changes that were made within the past few years on Twitter were nothing compared to what’s happened in year. People also feared that a policy change on November 15th could let anyone’s content be free game for data scraping to feed Twitter’s new proprietary genAI bot, Grok. However, I learned that it’s a hoax, and it was too late to recover the content I deleted as soon as I came to this realization. I am so fucking tired, dude...

I didn’t want this to happen. Nobody did. But also, within the past decade, Twitter morphed into an actively hostile social media site. Any changes to their algorithm or site structure were intentionally made to bring out the worst in us. Enragement was engagement. “Dunking people in the Quote Retweets” became a meme. Individuals put their entire livelihoods on performance metrics. People engaged witch hunts or made callout posts all the time, whether it was justified or not. The site’s guilty of promoting “doomscrolling” behaviors which can incite fear and despair to its users. Information misconstrued by public perception and fear mongering became so rampant that the Community Notes team was built to specifically combat it. Twitter fucking sucked, and this kind of environment encouraged bullies, debaters, fear mongers, and terminally online users to thrive.

Worse yet, Twitter was intentionally made to anchor you in the present and forget about the past, which was not easy for me as a digital artist. Its archiving support was an absolute joke, and it’s nearly impossible to look back on tweets that you made over a few years ago. Because of the algorithm’s structure and lack of archival features, time was of the essence on this site. If you wanted to hop onto an art trend, then you had to start making art for it NOW instead of later. Also, posting art in general was a complete gamble: either you would be lucky enough to get enough eyes on your piece to get oodles of likes and retweets, or it would crash HARD and you’ll get little to no engagement. It’s terrible, and the visible metrics on every tweet made me feel even worse.

None of these were fun experiences, but the beginning of the end came when Elon Musk claimed ownership of Twitter. He’s not so much of a bad actor as he is a product of this website’s hostile social structure: Dude’s terminally online and mostly talks shit to boost his ego. In many ways, he’s like Donald Trump, except Musk is more of a techbro. His influence could very well put the final nail in the coffin for Twitter, because all he's ever done is destroy the last things that made the site unique. Twitter was renamed to “X,” something that Musk wanted to do for over 20 years, and replaced the logo with a generic unicode 𝕏. Any terminology related to Twitter’s bird theming was completely scraped for generic terms, such as “retweets” becoming “reposts.” Twitter started charging money for access to its API. And worst of all, new services and site changes were made in service to Musk himself like the proprietary genAI assistant Grok, and site functionality changes made to things like the Block function. I can’t help but think that Musk got tired of being blocked by so many people, so he issued that new change to the Block function, even if it puts people at risk of being seen by any stalkers they meant to avoid.

I was willing to tough it out for the past five years or so, but I can’t take it anymore. I only stuck around on Twitter because my friends were on there. However, what made Twitter so valuable was that it was a central nexus for all sorts of people. From the low-key standard users to big-name celebrities, Twitter kind of bridged the gap between the two. Yes, brands and celebrities were using Twitter as an advertising vector, but you could talk to them directly! Very few sites could do that.

Twitter was where I found a close-knit community that was largely insulated from even the nastiest stuff from the greater userbase. I found my Splatoon friends and fans through Twitter, and I am still keeping in touch with some folks to this day. Sure, any social media site could be capable of this, but Twitter had just enough hustle & bustle to make it easy to form connections to people.

Twitter also fostered business connections through organic conversation. I met my writing editor there! Along with some sensitivity readers, too! And all I did was take a shot in the dark by sending a call-to-action tweet. That was awesome. I would rather make connections (for creative business or not) through shared interests & creative fields instead of muddling through something like LinkedIn.

It’s so sad to see a website crumble under enshittification, and it makes me extremely skeptical about any other social platform that becomes extremely popular. If Twitter can fall from grace like this, it can happen again. It’s like how an enormous civilization can eventually fall, if the Roman civilization is anything to go by. I would like an online place to hang out and share art, but not when said place is actively hostile to me and everyone around me. It doesn’t have to be this way.

What’s really rubbing salt in the wound was that we had a VERY good social media platform, Cohost, that is also shutting down due to a lack of funding. And while people have managed to migrate to BlueSky over Twitter, I don’t expect this to last forever. I fear the day that BlueSky will fall from grace, but it’s a matter of WHEN, not IF, it will happen. Even though I carelessly deleted my content off of Twitter, I did save an archive of my data and I intend to post the rest of my art on the Artwork page as an online archive. It’s a big reason why I made this website!

I sure hope BlueSky doesn’t collapse in on itself. And as for Twitter, now known as “X,” that website can rot in hell along with Elon Musk. I hope this will be the last time I will talk about something this negatively charged for a long time, whether it’s about Twitter or something else.

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