Why I Quit Twitter, a List

After 12 years and over 41,700 tweets, I’ve deactivated my Twitter account. Here’s a few reasons why.

• It made me unhappy.
• It made people around me unhappy.
• It helped elect Donald Trump and continues to give him a platform to ruin the world.
• Its interface is designed to make people fight.
• Jack.
• Its leadership doesn’t seem to know the first thing about human beings or communities or how people think or feel or talk.
• Its leadership has delusions of governance that they use as an excuse to not moderate their community.
• Alex Jones.
• Every interview with Jack shows that he has no grasp of the how to fix problems or what the problems even are.
• I’ve lost faith that it’ll ever improve.
• It’s like a vacuum, sucking up every word I have to type, leaving very few words for other places. I’d like to put more words other places.
• The ads.
• I don’t like being reduced to the filler in between the ads.
• They fucked their third party developers, including Tweetbot, my favorite client.
• The out-of-order timeline.
• Nazis. Literally, nazis. If you can’t boot nazis off your service, you have no business running anything.
• The generally shitty way people treat each other on Twitter makes me lose hope in humanity, and without that hope I basically can’t function.
• How the generally shitty way people treat each other on Twitter has warped expectations for what is allowable behavior online.
• I feel like I’ve spent over a decade thinking about what Twitter was doing wrong and how Twitter could be fixed, when I should have been thinking about other ways online community could form and thrive. Quitting will, hopefully, help me focus on that.
• The metrics of likes and retweets were addictive. I don’t like feeling like an addict.
• The realization that Twitter is just the comment section of a news article, without the news article.
• Again, Donald Trump. I don’t want to have anything in common with that festering, semi-sentient pile of racist garbage. Now I have one less thing in common with him, at least.
• What happened to James Gunn.
• The person who tweeted at me “LOL WTF” today as I was trying to say something nice and supportive to a friend in mourning.
• The constant stream of outrage. I understand the importance of screaming into a pillow now and again, but if you do it too much you’re gonna need a new pillow.
• Their community malpractice. I’ve been building communities online for a long time. I can’t be part of a place that does it this badly.
• It made me unhappy. And 2018 has more than enough unhappiness already.