Why I Quit Twitter, a List
2 min readAug 17, 2018
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.
