I’ve Quit Twitter
I’ve left Twitter. Possibly forever. Despite the fun timeline I had there, far too much toxic negativity was entering my daily life. And I blame the company, because it is exactly this daily dose of poison that makes them their money.
During my vacations, I purposely spend very little time online. Putting my phone away and turning off notifications helps me focus on the here and now. The sunset, so to speak, rather than the photo of it and the snarky comments.
When I went back to work at the end of August, after 4 weeks of Sweet Nothing, there was a lot of email and work and other stuff. So I left Twitter off for another week. And then, after 5 weeks of absence, I logged back in.
I was shocked by what I saw.
Angry, frustrated and anxious
It wasn’t my well-filtered timeline. It was the trends Twitter ‘selected for me’, making the promise of careful, data-based personalization... I had noticed it before, of course, but it was a gradual change that had somehow crept up on me. Every single ‘trend’ Twitter pointed out to me made me angry, frustrated or anxious.
Everything I clicked on somehow led to a heated discussion or argument. I myself haven’t tweeted about politics for years, even though it’s a topic I follow and care about deeply. And, suddenly, I wondered: why do I avoid this topic here? Why do I have to hide a part of myself on this platform, for fear of getting dragged into a mud fight?
What’s so hard about marketing and guitar videos?
Thing is, it’s not exactly rocket science to figure out what I like to see on Twitter: I respond to personal messages from an inner circle of people I interact with a lot. I click on articles about marketing, business, and important world news. That’s it. And after 10 years of daily use, Twitter’s algorithm is either complete crap or it knows that. So the question is: why does Twitter still choose to show me the latest fuss about some TV personality’s leaked sex video, while I have literally never heard of them. Why would I be interested in misogynistic comments on a talk show I never watch? Why, Twitter, why?
The same thing happens on YouTube. 95% of what I watch there are videos on guitar playing and blues music, with the very occasional marketing how-to or laptop or car review. And maybe a funny cat video every 2 or 3 months. And always after 10pm. So why did the app suddenly start sending me updates all day? And why is my recommendations list full of crashing motorcycles, young ladies losing their bikini bottoms in swimming pools and fake vaccine news? The answer is, unfortunately, quite simple: this is the content that gets clicked on and responded to a lot. And if you click and respond, you spend more time on the platform and they can show you a lot of ads.
Disjointed data points and primitive algorithms
The worst part of all this, I think, is that these big tech companies, with all their money and all their technology, could easily build algorithms that would actually help me. They could set up their platforms perfectly so that everyone gets to see the things they are interested in and everyone has a good experience. But that approach has two serious drawbacks for them:
First of all, it’s a lot of work. I’ve spent a lot of time in ad backends of platforms that have the pretense and reputation of knowing “everything” about their users. Oh, the disappointment! Tech companies posess lots of loose, disjointed data points about their users. The algorithms they use to turn that data into real knowledge about what motivates these people are extremely primitive. Giving their systems a real idea of what an individual user wants to do and shaping the experience based on that would require huge new investments and a fundamentally different focus.
Digital applesauce
Fortunately (for them), they don’t need to. And that’s the second problem. As a tech giant running a content platform, looking at the content instead of the user is much easier. Just measure what content generates the most interaction and then dump it on everyone’s timeline, with the minimum of personalization to keep up the illusion. Because, why would a company spend money to improve my experience, if they can make more cash pissing me off, frustrating me and scaring me?
Peace and quiet
I’ve tried all sorts of things to fix the problem myself. My block and filter lists span several pages. I even tried (an ultimate, drastic, last-ditch measure) to tweet via Tweetdeck. But now I have come to the conclusion that I’m just about done with it. So I’ve turned Twitter off. And I’m enjoying the peace and quiet, although I really miss a lot of people there. The next time I log on, probably to delete my account for good, I will make a list of those people and look for an alternative way to keep in touch with them. I will lose some of them, as you do when you move to another city or change jobs, but that’s just life, I guess. It’s for the better, because I’m already noticing that the absence of all this negativity makes for better, happier and more productive days.
