I took a short twitter detox for two days. For two days I didn’t look at tweets, replies and more. For two days if I wanted to rant I couldn’t. For two days I couldn’t see replies. For two days I couldn’t read people complain.
It is good to take a break from twitter sometimes. I don’t believe in social media addiction. Social media is a conversation. If you can get addicted to having conversations then the world is messed up. Twitter is a social network, not an addiction.
What triggered me to take a twitter break, aside from the ownership change and the negativity I see on a daily basis, is the inability to change from the “home” feed. Until recently we could swap between algorithm driven timelines and chronological ones. The ability to switch between both has been made much harder.
Twitter is making the same mistake as Facebook did, which Facebook then did to Instagram. It decided that Twitter will now be a Right leaning tool for propaganda and disinformation, rather than a chronological timeline of tweets by friends and friends of friends. It will throw in sponsored content.
And Finally
You can get Twitter Blue for 8-11 USD per month, to get the blue tick, or you can get Wordpress Premium for 8 dollars a month, if you pay for the year in advance. This allows you to monetise your content and more. It also gives you full acess to a blogging platform, rather than simple microblogging. For four dollars per month you get the personal option, and you can get a personal blog. There are cheaper options. The point is that 8 USD per month for a product like Twitter is extortion, especially given the volatility of the site.
Mastodon is also an option, that is free/donation based depending on whether you choose an existing server, implement your own, and whether enough donations have been made to be sustainable.
Since 2006 I have thought of Twitter, Jaiku, Mastodon and Plurk as conversation channels, rather than microblogging. I go to these places and use them as chatroooms rather than microblogs. If I want to blog I have my full scale blog. This website, to keep me entertained.
I bring this up because at lunchtime today, the time at which I usually get tired with social media, two people frustrated me. One person asked for what reason Musk should have been stopped from buying twitter. The second said that without hashtags they wouldn’t be able to find content on Mastodon.
I might be argumentative on social media but that is not why I use social media. Ideally I want to use social media to have pleasant conversations that eventually lead to me wanting to meet people in person, or failing that, to collaborate online on projects. This lunchtime I found two arguments and my reaction was “I don’t want to invest hundreds or thousands of hours on a social network, like Mastodon, to have it be as big of a waste of time, as twitter, in recent years. I use social media to be social, not to argue.
Social media is an investment in time, attention and more. I stopped using Facebook and Instagram because I felt I was making money for others, without having any benefit of my own. The more posts you see, the more Instagram and Facebook earned. In the end I was tired of giving them a steady stream of cash. At the time I thought, If I took the time I spent on IG and FB and invested it on my own website then it would do better, and I’d get just as much engagement. This is tongue in cheek. If I am being ignored I might as well be ignored on my own website.
At the end of today I will have gone two days without tweeting. If I manage two weeks then I will have kicked the habit. I need to find a replacement. Blogging is one productive distraction.
I have used Twitter almost every single day since I created my first account in 2006. During this time I have met a lot of people, gone to a lot of events, learned a lot and been part of communities. The decision to take a break is not an easy one to make, because it involves losing touch with a community. It involves leaving a social network at the moment when you’re following and conversing with more people.
Twitter icon transforming into the Mastodon M
I feel obligated to take a break for two main reasons. The first is that it makes rational sense to leave social networks when their ownership and morality swing to the Far Right. I don’t want to read news by Far Right newspapers, watch their news, listen to their shows, or be part of their social networks.
Theoretically I could simply shrink the number of people I follow and keep my tweets private, and I’d be happy with that. The real reason I want to take a twitter break is that I don’t want Musk to win. I don’t want him to be able to tweet “oh look, the servers are under pressure” and having leading poll questions that provide false justification for immoral points of view.
From a European perspective we cannot continue to use an app where disinformation is seen as free speech. We cannot be on a social network where the mainstream media, despite their Right Wing ownership in many cases, is denigrated and where he wants “citizen” journalism to thrive.
“So it’s perhaps no surprise that Musk, a billionaire businessman, went off on Apple this past week. He understands that the iPhone maker is an impediment to his financial goals.” source.
If I stop using Twitter, it is because those in charge at the moment go against sense of ethics and morality. I don’t want to be part of a network where people are brainwashed and misled. and where mob mentality is encouraged, rather than rational reason and thought.
Twitter should never have had an IPO. It should never have agreed to being sold, as it enriched greedy people, but with a cost to society at large. It should have become a non profit organisation, working as a medium by which for people to communicate with each other globally, where morality and ethics were prioritised, where rational, decent people made decisions.
We have Mastodon now, and with time Mastodon will be as vibrant as Twitter, but for now using Mastodon means being isolated from a community we enjoy, meeting in a place we no longer want to go to.
And finally, I don’t want Twitter to go away. I want user engagement to drop long enough for Musk to rethink his political lean long enough for twitter to become a place for good, once more.
I find myself tempted to give up on social media and focus on blogging instead. I am tired of social media after decades of use. I am tired that users, that provide all of the value are ignored, and that greedy boards of directors can sell users as if they were lumps of coal or sugar beets.
By being sold to Musk Twitter has become a symbol of the Far Right, and Far Right ideologies are being pushed. Musk pushed a poll asking whether Drumpf should be reinstated and for now Drumpf is winning. This means that in a few days Musk will be able to say “I brought back Drumpf because that is what people wanted.” He already said that he would skew the algorithms to favour what he thinks of as positive.
That’s why I don’t want to use Twitter anymore. That’s why the last social network that I have been using discourages me from staying around. It’s not that I don’t like the community. It’s that I don’t like what the person in charge represents.
Yet again, we, the early adopters, who provided a social network with value, and the inertia to become one of the leading social networks, are homeless, and in need of a new place to use socially.
I am not convinced by Mastodon because people are too eager to onboard, get people to add alt text to images, and use hashtags. It doesn’t feel like a community. It feels like a sect trying to find converts. I want to have conversations, not be nagged about alt tags, and the use of hashtags.
When twitter was young, around 2007 or 2008 the introduction of hashtags, to a large degree destroyed the conversation, and turned social media into a popularity contest, rather than a network of friends, conversing with other friends. I am on social media to be sociable. Social media is a shell of its former self. I’d rather revert to blogging and generate content that will benefit me, rather than billionaires who do not see any value in users.
Before I end this post, it feels as if social media has become like normal life. The loud popular extroverts have huge followings and we are competing against them, as introverts. Fighting for attention takes away a lot of the pleasure of social media. I might as well meet people in the physical world, for that type of competition.
I might as well blog. If I am heard, then that’s good, and if I am not then I have practiced writing.
Twitter was bought by an individual that many of us do not trust, and we fear that it may no longer represent the values that we cherish. That Twitter is bought is nothing new. Myspace was bought by Murdoch, many years ago. Jaiku was a great competitor to twitter but it was bought by Google to become Google+. Eventually Google sunset Google+ and we were left with identi.ca but that soon fell flat.
Mastodon is just another attempt to get the same type of community as Twitter managed to find, but distributed across a multitude of instances that do not always say yes, and that do not always show everyone’s every tweet. Add to this that they’re smaller, so policy depends on one or two individuals in some cases, rather than a team.
Through Mastodon people are discovering what Twitter was like when it was still an alpha, beta and other stages. They are discovering why we enjoyed being part of that smaller, more personal community. I am not hooked to Mastodon yet. I haven’t found a worthwhile community yet. It still feels like talking to a small group of strangers rather than a group of friends.
I currently play with two accounts, one anonymous, and one with my name. I used to feel comfortable posting as myself but with the pandemic I prefer to protect how I post. I also don’t have the warm friendships and constant in person meetings that I had with Twitter people. Whether you know people or not, in person, does affect how you behave online.
Twitter hasn’t imploded yet and people haven’t migrated to other networks. Mastodon will grow. The question is how fast, and whether people from other networks will come through and recreate their networks.
I saw one plugin that allows people to important their twitter friends. The best way to migrate friends is via e-mails that are hashed, and compared.
With the current situation at Twitter I have chosen to take a twitter break. Twitter hasn’t been fun during the last three years, which is part of the reason I went anonymous, private, and then public but anonymous again. It used to be about having conversations with people that I would eventually want to meet in person.
Now that Twitter has shifted political slant and verified account have lost their status there is little to keep me on Twitter. I see it slipping in the wrong direction and I do not want to be part of the network at the moment. I might return in a few weeks or months. For now I think that the best is just to stay away.
I have two mastodon accounts now, on different instances and I am willing to give those networks a chance. I’m on those instances but there is a difference. I am not inclined to invest weeks, months or years on trying to find a community, only for it to be destroyed, once again. Either the owners just grow bored, or the social network is bought, or the users grow bored and leave. After flitting from website from 1996 to today I have lost the drive to invest any time on networks that can be bought by billionaires, with no checks or balances. Why do we provide value to websites that are just sold by greedy people to other greedy people?
I did consider returning to Facebook and Instagram but I don’t think I am inclined to return to these networks. If pandemic policies change and we get to COVID zero then I will have a strong motivation to return to Facebook, for the groups. For now I might take a short break.
I think blogging and web development have a better return on investment than social networks. I will focus on these.
Twitter is alive and healthy, with vibrant communities and an opportunity to converse with people and find information that mainstream media are sometimes slow to report on. Over the last week that balance is swinging towards less positive times.
In Europe, freedom of speech, and freedom of expression require people to say things that they can back up with evidence and facts. If you say something that is demonstrably false, or demonstrably misleading then you are held to account for this.
In the US they believe that freedom of expression includes the freedom to lie with impunity, to spread disinformation and to mislead people, without consequences. By doing this society is vulnerable to tyranny and fascism. If we are told a lie that we want to believe then we are less likely to quibble its veracity. We will repeat the lie, and if we see people who enjoy the same lie, then we will repeat that they have told the same lie. Disinformation is a positive feedback loop of false information being spread as real information, once it gains enough traction.
By buying Twitter, and by saying that Twitter wants to bring freedom of speech, and freedom of expression Musk is saying something that we all value and think is important. The problem though, as I have mentioned above, is that the freedom of expression that Musk is talking about, is not a European freedom, but an American one. It is suspected that he would bring back people like Trump, and that he would make twitter a welcoming place for people to spread lies and disinformation, in impunity.
There is another larger scope to this conversation and that scope is that Twitter is a global social network used by over a billion people a day. During this pandemic it has allowed people who want to find information about the risks presented by Covid-19 to follow experts in their fields, to hear accounts from sufferers of Long Covid, and to get a global appreciation of the risks of the disease. When the WHO backs up what the experts have shared on twitter, and vice versa, when the information makes sense to our moral compass, then Twitter is a great resource for information. It should be protected. It should not be possible for one individual to buy a network with over a billion users.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,”
There are plenty of ways in which people can be proponents of free speech. They can invest in education, they can invest in newspapers, they can invest in library projects and more. They can invest in making sure that people are granted free and equal access to information. You don’t need to buy a social network to promote free speech. Remember that freedom of expression comes with the obligation to be well-informed, and knowledgeable. His “freedom” is to spread rumours and opinions. These undermine, rather than help democracy. I believe that he wants dismantle the gatekeepers, so that it is even more challenging for people to have access to trustworthy information.
On Monday, he tweeted that he hoped his worst critics would remain on Twitter, because “that is what free speech means.” He added in his statement that he hoped to increase trust by making Twitter’s technology more transparent, defeating the bots that spam people on the platform and “authenticating all humans.”
When Google bought Jaiku, and when Facebook bought Instagram we stayed on the networks. Jaiku eventually became Google+ but Google+ was then dumped. Instagram, after being bought by Facebook lost its soul. Instead of being a network of friends, and friends of friends it became a network of adverts and influencers. I dumped the network because I no longer derived pleasure from the network.
Now onto Twitter. Musk “… tweeted that he hoped his worst critics would remain on twitter because ‘that is what free speech means.'”. Free speech isn’t about whether we stay on a platform or leave. It is about the freedom to be on a network that is not owned by someone we do not trust. It is about being on a network that is not owned by a temperamental individual. It is about being on a platform we trust, with values we cherish. I do not value the US values of “free speech”, I value the European ones, that include accountability. Remember the first line of the New York times’ article is “The world’s richest mansucceeded in a bid to acquire the influential social networking service, which he has said he wants to take private.”
Anyone valuing democracy should be worried by that sentence. Within the article they say that Twitter has 220 million daily users. He would take the conversation of 220 million people, and control the network they use, privately. This should not be possible.
Mr. Musk has made some of his intentions clear in regulatory filings, tweets and public appearances: The company must scrap nearly all of its moderation policies, which ban content like violent threats, harassment and spam. It must provide more transparency about the algorithm it uses to boost tweets in users’ newsfeeds. And it must become a private company.
I will finally leave you with the quote above. Do you want to be on a social network without moderation? I do not. That’s why I don’t use other platforms. I am ready to leave twitter, when the time comes. I have been ready to do so for years.
The Roman Civilisation is being tweeted about on Twitter. There are accounts that tweet about ongoing archeological digs, museum opening times and more. They also share images and videos, providing people with a visual way of learning about the Romans.
One of these twitter accounts is Roman Britain. They tweet original content as well as retweet content written by other accounts. It is an interesting way to learn more about Roman Britain. Such accounts are interesting because they open our eyes to lesser known sites that may go unnoticed. It also provides us with a glimpse of locations that may be nearby that we were not yet aware of.
You can also follow hashtags to see tweets about specific aspects of the Romans. For example if you look for Mithras you can follow tweets about Mithraism. When I was learning about the Romans we needed to go to books and find chapters about the topics we wanted to learn about. Today, with twitter information can be found within seconds from a variety of sources, whether wikipedia, newspaper articles, new research papers, content on documentary streaming sites or more.
With a hashtag like archeology you can see news and tweets about ongoing archeological digs and even find opportunities to comment on or discuss current findings with the archeologists as they research the topics they are studying or exploring.
Although history is about the past, this does not mean that research and new findings are not emerging. We have often been to recent archeological digs and seen fresh finds. When you visit Pompei or Herculaneo you see sites that are so large that they take lifetimes to excavate.
History is not just limited to books and old websites that are rarely updated. It is dynamic, so if you know children, or students encourage them to look up resources that provide them with constantly updated sources of new sites, knowledge and more.
Sports and live events are Twitter Cash cows, as a result of which the will of those contributing to twitter financially is given priority. I have seen two or three tweets about the speed with which olympic anim gifs and other content is removed. In one case I saw that content is pulled down within minutes.
On the other side of the equation is bullying and harassment of ordinary people on twitter. In the cases where people are bullied or harassed twitter is passive, letting people deal with the fallout from flame wars and other unpleasant moments.
Twitter was a social network for the first year or two but since then it has become a broadcast network. It focuses on the people that bring it money rather than attention. It focuses on verifying accounts with hundreds of thousands or even millions of viewers to serve its own interests. Users like you or I are not that important.
There is the popular phrase that “people who complain still want to do business with you”. I stopped complaining about twitter years ago. I deleted my first account and stopped using the service. If you are not happy with the way twitter behaves and if you are not happy with the preferential treatment that it offers its sponsors then the simple solution is to reduce the amount of time you give twitter.
When twitter was a social network you were justified in keeping the twitter application open on your phone and laptop but since it has become more of an RSS aggregator that devotion of time has become worthless. If you’re not happy with twitter spend less time on the network. Use it as infrequently as you use the bath in your home. We take daily showers because it takes less time and because there is less waste. The same is true of twitter.
Twitter is a social network that needs eyeballs to justify charging its clients money. Broadcasters and the IOC are clients. If you’re on twitter complaining you are a pair of eyeballs. You are the attention they are looking for. If you are unhappy and abandon the network that pair of eyeballs is gone and their revenue stream declines. When enough people affect their bottom line in this manner they are forced to change.
Twitter is easy to replace today for the simple reason that it became a news aggregator. There are dozens, if not hundreds of apps and social networks for the sharing of news, information and other content. Twitter is no longer alone. If enough people move away then they will be forced to change. We are the commodity. The audience justifies the fees. If the audience is gone then the fees are unjustified. Twitter was meant to keep us happy and it has failed. That is the reason for which I tweeted 70,000 times in the first two years and less than three thousand times in the last five years.
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