I recently locked my Twitter account, and removed all links to it from my site and other socials. I still open it from time to time. A few Argentinian accounts I like still post there, as the exodus to BlueSky has not reached that public yet, and there is one singular account I regularly enjoy seeing on my timeline, but other than that it’s pretty much dead to me. I don't post anything to it, and I don't retweet anything either.

And it feels good! It’s one less social media site to patrol, one less space where I have to simultaneously be audience, performer, and performance. Plus, it’s not like I did it out of willpower (not entirely, at least), the site is legitimately getting more and more joyless as time passes.

I open it and nothing keeps me in for more than a few minutes, nothing engages me like it did before. That doesn’t mean the site is encouraging better usage and less addictive tendencies, I just get sick of it much quicker. Instead of feeling surrounded by people I kept bumping into, I felt like I was going through the motions in a sea of people who perform those same motions like automatons who can only feel ennui and anxiety.

Speaking of automatons, that platform is infested with them. The other half of the Twitter experience reeks of burning machines.

The Doomsday Clock, a representation of how close I am to deleting these awful fucking sites.Everywhere there’s ads of the exact same crypto, dropshipping, AI, nazi, or conspiracy posts that keep being shoved on my feed (and I do mean “exact same”. If you mute or block one of the ad accounts, you’ll see another one with identical words and images).
There’s discourse baiting and engagement farming with yields I’ve never seen in my life; sickening crop rotations of rage-inducing fake takes, vacuous chain posts and discourse farming, all genetically modified in a lab to fully optimise the amount of time (and times) you spend replying, sharing, dunking, contributing, etc.
Finally, there’s the sickening swarm of gimmick accounts that only compile industrial amounts of memes, cute videos of animals, and screenshots of other tweets, endless incestuous re-using of each other’s already re-heated content. It’s so bad it reminds me of Instagram, and I am seconds away from deleting that every other day.

I think the evolution of that first half I mentioned can be attributed, at least partly to a general sense of burnout. Less people use Twitter genuinely. Some leave because the site is getting less and less usable, or just full of nazis and bots (and nazi bots, of course). Others stay mainly or only because of Those Few People they liked bumping into, and seeing them migrate to another platform could encourage the same.

The second half is part of a larger problem that also affects other social media sites, and the internet in general, but it hits Twitter HARD and contributes to that same unusability. Lots of gimmick accounts have been bought and overtaken by crypto and far right parasites looking for the biggest platforms to preach and advertise on, but this goes even further. Now more than ever, if you see a viral post with an exceedingly stupid opinion being dunked on, or random accounts posting the same viral videos that have been making the rounds for more than a decade, they might actually be bots, with engagement boosted by other bots meant to bait engagement not for the clout but for money (either because verified accounts can *technically* earn money from engagement, or because they’re trying to artificially inflate their numbers so the account can be sold).

As Twitter and other sites get more and more saturated with non-human, non-genuine capital C Content, I move on to other sites I care about more. Bluesky is better (for now) since it suffers less from the bot infestation. I also use Tumblr, though not that often.
And, more and more, I’ve been taking the kind of stuff I would usually share on social media and either keeping it to myself or showing it to my friends and family. I write my thoughts on movies and games here, or I message my dad to tell him about the music I’m listening to. I think of some funny wordplay and I send it to my partners. I find all of this much more enjoyable! The people whose thoughts I actually care about can tell me what they think, and I’m left with their impressions instead of how many impressions I got.