Reasons that I left Twitter, and other disagreeable stuff

 I am far from the first person to dump Twitter after being on there for many years, and I can see a whole lot of reasons to do so. 

In fact there are many reasons to avoid all social media, and the reasons for staying on it are not always ones that you find helpful. Even this blog is in a limited way social media, because I am saying things to you and it is possible to respond, and I do have that very social media instinct of wanting to find out if anyone has looked at it.

So Twitter is an easy one to leave and the reasons get clearer day by day. To start with, it was interesting, and very limited in what you could post (140 characters, barely a haiku, from what I remember). There were interesting thoughts, very little vanity and absolutely no 'influencing'. Now it seems to be dominated by commercial accounts trying to seem non-commercial and people whose entire schtick is 'look at me', whether to make money from clicks or just because they are enormous bell-ends. It also has huge numbers of bots flooding people's pages and drowning out anything that might actually be interesting. 

But all of these factors have been there for a few years, and the thing that drove me straight off in the end was that when I clicked into the 'You might like' section (which should have been called "You certainly won't like... but people have paid to put this lot in your face"), the first thing I got was three very similar anti-immigrant videos, all involving violence. I am genuinely interested in the algorithm that got me off Twitter. How did they think I would like them? Are there specific data tags that say 'Racist shite' and the algo says 'Looks like this one would enjoy some racist shite; serve him up some of those'. How much detail is in the tags? Could we see a list of how much detail Twitter stores about the objectionable nature of each video it serves?

And I do understand that some of this is actually not in the hands of real people, because an algorithm that tries to get people to stay longer on the site will follow the instructions it has been given, and if you do not require taste or decency or morality from your program then it will not invent those features on its own. 

But there are other reasons that Twitter (and maybe some of the other sites - Facebook I am looking at you here) are disappearing from my life. For one thing, I think some sites serve a quite unexpected purpose similar to physical self-harm. If someone gets a feeling of relief from hurting themselves with a blade because it provides some kind of outlet for feelings that they cannot control, then isn't it possible that when we go onto social media and are outraged by something, we may have gone there for that very purpose? We may feel a need to be shocked, or angry, or hurt, for reasons that are as much about compulsion as a teenage 'cutter'. And if the need is what we are going there for, it means that what we read is essentially irrelevant. We are going to get a fix of outrage and it doesn't really matter what outrages us: Trump, Musk, Antifa, Farage, Putin, Daesh, racism. It might not be about them at all but about some need within us. 

The other very obvious problem of Twitter is that there is so much idiocy on display and so little understanding of how to think. I have noticed that whenever a post on Twitter includes the phrase 'It's really simple', it almost always isn't. Strangely, I also find that often a post that includes the phrase 'It's complicated' is equally wrong because it is trying to make complex something which is actually simple.

So as a first step I have left the little blue bird, and I would be completely happy to see it all sink without trace. And with the time I now have, I will try to make the world a tiny bit better rather than worse.