Why, am I still on Twitter?

Am I still on Twitter? Why?

Still, why am I on Twitter?

Why, I am still on Twitter!

Twitter (I won’t call it that other thing) is obviously getting to be more and more of a cesspool. There are people openly and proudly advocating for Nazism, racism, and sex/gender/orientation violence. Every day there’s another new low. The fact that it comes through as a screenshot with a well crafted debunking and/or dunk is getting less and less helpful.

I’ve tried fighting the good fight but it feels like the last remnants of people who might have been persuadable have all either picked a side or left. The sane political voices that used to provide good news, or a good argument to refute the assholes, are at best fighting a holding action at this point. Most of the creative people I followed have left, and the most that are still there are only posting marketing materials and not seriously interacting. (Not that I blame them.) Of the people I actually know, the vast majority haven’t posted in months, and in some cases, years.

But there’s a handful of people that I don’t communicate with anywhere else, that I don’t want to lose all track of. Despite there finally being hints of an end to the long dark tunnel of my wife’s health issues, that’s still a ways off at best, so almost all of my social contact that isn’t with coworkers or store employees is through Twitter. There’s a handful of news sources that still occasionally provide legitimately useful and hopeful news.

But it’s rare. So now I scroll farther and more often searching for a bit of positive reinforcement, when there’s less and less to be found.

But what are the alternatives? I’m on Mastodon, but that didn’t seem to get a critical mass. With Jack leaving BlueSky, there’s less worries about that turning into “Twitter, but Crypto”, but do I really want to start this addiction over? Reddit has some interesting stuff, but it’s speed running the enshitification cycle even if it is keeping the assholes slightly better contained so far.

I think for now, I’m going to remove the app from my phone and tablet, to cut down on the doom scrolling. I’ll keep it on the desktop for a bit, and see what it does if I just hit it less often. And I’ll try (again) to write more here. Not that I’ve had much luck with that the last five times, but hey, you never know.

I miss Usenet so bad.