I would say if Twitter isn’t good for you, just quit it. I deleted Twitter some time ago and I honestly don’t miss it. I really wonder why people keep complaining but don’t take real action a.k.a deleting their account.
Author here - I’m glad you did. I use Twitter to stay in touch with some friends and professional contacts (I’ve deleted FB, IG, LI etc). Twitter is a toxic cesspool for many people but I’ve curated it for my needs to a point where my use of it is very intentional (I have 3k+ blocked accounts for example).
Some might think that I’m in a bubble (and you might be right to some extent), but I do not consume news through Twitter. I still read “real” news and get a print newspaper.
If you do even a modicum of curation/filtering, email is 80% signal. Letting everyone with your address deliver to your inbox is a recipe for a mess on any platform.
My comment is about the general behaviour of people as reported by jlelse in the parent comment i.e. a lot of people seem to talk about twitter being bad but not quitting it.
If you’re a content creator it’s useful to have a feed for your releases. In the old world it was RSS but now we live in this fucked up iOS-app-store-dominated world so Twitter is the only option. Post your ad and gtfo.
My purpose here is to not scrub things I’ve said. I’m aware of archiving services like the Internet Archive (donate to them). I know they can preserve my tweets—forever—before I delete them. I know that the Internet is not ephemeral. My goal here is to be more in control of my public profile and persona, while being honest in the moment.
I don’t believe that context changes my point: it’s all hair splitting. You don’t want your tweets to be on your profile; you’re literally scrubbing it. To be clear, I don’t think it’s a bad thing – I suspect Twitter should actually do this by default for users who don’t opt out – I just think it’s being intellectually circuitous to say your purpose isn’t to scrub your profile.
It might be more accurate to say that one doesn’t want to leave a public and easily-locatable trail of past transient thoughts (especially as they can be weaponized through cancel culture), whilst still refraining from self-censoring themselves. In other words, be honest in expressing one’s thoughts, but making sure that their existance is transient.
Opinions evolve; so these transient thoughts may or may not find their way to permanent notes, articles, blog posts.
I’m more or less arriving at OP’s (u/krn) conclusions myself.
The entitlement and toxicity in this thread by the commenters is not much different than on the orange site unfortunately. I’m disappointed in you all.
I would say if Twitter isn’t good for you, just quit it. I deleted Twitter some time ago and I honestly don’t miss it. I really wonder why people keep complaining but don’t take real action a.k.a deleting their account.
Author here - I’m glad you did. I use Twitter to stay in touch with some friends and professional contacts (I’ve deleted FB, IG, LI etc). Twitter is a toxic cesspool for many people but I’ve curated it for my needs to a point where my use of it is very intentional (I have 3k+ blocked accounts for example).
Some might think that I’m in a bubble (and you might be right to some extent), but I do not consume news through Twitter. I still read “real” news and get a print newspaper.
Just delete it and email you friends and professional contacts. A curated cesspool is still a cesspool.
Email? Who emails their friends or even reads personal email. Email is 99% junk, way worse signal to noise ratio than even something like Twitter.
If you do even a modicum of curation/filtering, email is 80% signal. Letting everyone with your address deliver to your inbox is a recipe for a mess on any platform.
I do, a lot.
I dunno. Try fastmail and watch who you hand your email out to?
Why do you care what I do with my life?
Same reason people say they should start exercising but don’t or quitting smoking etc.
talking is easier than doing
That’s true. Isn’t there a phrase “Scrolling is the new smoking”?
Author here - your comment seems to assume a lot about me.
What in my post proposes that others should delete their twitter?
My comment is about the general behaviour of people as reported by jlelse in the parent comment i.e. a lot of people seem to talk about twitter being bad but not quitting it.
If you’re a content creator it’s useful to have a feed for your releases. In the old world it was RSS but now we live in this fucked up iOS-app-store-dominated world so Twitter is the only option. Post your ad and gtfo.
Whilst I don’t begrudge folks of this choice, I feel that this:
is in tension with the later assertion:
The purpose is to scrub prior remarks – which, given how social media works, is not wholly unreasonable.
You cut out context from the second quote
I don’t believe that context changes my point: it’s all hair splitting. You don’t want your tweets to be on your profile; you’re literally scrubbing it. To be clear, I don’t think it’s a bad thing – I suspect Twitter should actually do this by default for users who don’t opt out – I just think it’s being intellectually circuitous to say your purpose isn’t to scrub your profile.
It might be more accurate to say that one doesn’t want to leave a public and easily-locatable trail of past transient thoughts (especially as they can be weaponized through cancel culture), whilst still refraining from self-censoring themselves. In other words, be honest in expressing one’s thoughts, but making sure that their existance is transient.
Opinions evolve; so these transient thoughts may or may not find their way to permanent notes, articles, blog posts.
I’m more or less arriving at OP’s (u/krn) conclusions myself.
The context is important because I’m scrubbing content from Twitter, and not the Internet.
The method is to scrub prior remarks. Not quite the same, right?
I was sort of inspired by this post and the code to write my own version for Mastodon/Pleroma: https://github.com/e-zk/floots
It’s not as fleshed out nor does it delete favourites or reposts (yet), but it was fun to make.
The entitlement and toxicity in this thread by the commenters is not much different than on the orange site unfortunately. I’m disappointed in you all.
Don’t worry about it. Dumping on Twitter is a form of nerd virtue signalling.
FWIW I think it’s an interesting piece of software. Are there any issues registering it as an app in Twitter?
There weren’t for me but I imagine these days it may be a bit of a wait to get API keys.
I was half expecting this link to lead to a deleted Tweet…
Well, the first link in the post actually seems to do just that.
Why even bother with twitter in the first place. It’s a toxic cesspool.
It’s trivial to find better use of your time.
For me it feels like a hack to give yourself permit for bad behavior.
If you use Nix (and/or NixOS), and would like to try this out, checkout https://github.com/srid/ephemeral-twitter
There are a lot of these services around - I’ve been aware of the desire for people to delete their tweets for a couple of years now.