What happened at Twitt
In around 2009 I started a twitter account to get what seemed a direct line to gossip coming out of parliament house. In those days there didn’t seem to be any trolls. But it quickly got sordid. Soon i had my first exposure to what is really a kind of psychological warfare using images and every kind of harmful slur and mind game, intended to just break you down. It was rarely directed at me, in fact i mostly saw it directed at women. twitter wasn’t very good at getting rid of it quickly but i did see it take it down eventually. Then 2016 came around and i saw all the armies of trolls coming out of Russia or wherever to distort the discussion around trump. I did some analysis of this at the time using networking software. It was scary and fascinating – it undoubtedly changed the tone of twitter and it stayed that way really till 2020 when Trump himself got kicked off and the place seemed to have a little renaissance although I think it was also suffering from its own popularity at this point, conversations seemed dumbed down and the algorithm was rewarding clickbaity content more than ever. Musk was a presence. I liked him in the beginning, was excited about spaceX. Even thought he was funny when he walked in with a sink. But oh so quickly he went fash and then i knew it was all over. So i got out of there in late 2022 and deleted my account – just what the trolls had asked for all those years.
I only lost about 1000 followers and a few moments of slight fame with a well timed comment. I learnt a lot about interacting on social media on that place – about keeping a cool head, being fast and witty as you can, keeping it light most of the time. It was great. Now i’m on mastodon which is full of geeks, and threads which is sort of getting more like twitter but without the geeks, and without most of the journalists who are on bluesky (which i avoided as it was so exclusive and no one invited me and i felt like Jack had been part of the twitter betrayal so didn’t want to follow him anywhere). These last few months i probably waste most time on reddit but i’m wondering why i bother when it’s the same kind of content from a few dozen forums where i frequent, nothing like the smorgasboard of twit. I feel really burned by the twitter thing. We all built that place and it just got trashed.
