Twitter gave me a place to throw snark and short observations that wouldn’t work as a full post. It was also a good way to broadcast stuff to all of you to let you know that the site was down. It was a good place to get a feel for the big gaming stories of the day and a good way to see what other creators were up to. It was useful, but I’m done with the platform for good.<\/p>\n
I can’t point to a single event that made me quit Twitter. This wasn’t a snap judgement made in response to a single tweet, this was a long process where Twitter itself annoyed me into leaving. However, there was one Tweet that works as a pretty good shorthand for the problem I’m talking about. It said:<\/p>\n
Fuck you and everyone who thinks like you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
When viewed directly on the web, Twitter has two main tabs. The first is supposedly a feed of everyone you follow, although maybe this is curated by the system or maybe not. Maybe the tweets are in chronological order or maybe THE ALGORITHM picks a few that it thinks are most important and puts those at the top. There’s an option to disable this, but it’s not clear what the default behavior is, what THE ALGORITHM does, or what the option to disable it does. If I see a tweet from PC Gamer linking to an article and then six hours later I see the same tweet at the top of my feed again, does that mean PC Gamer repeated themselves, or is THE ALGORITHM trying to make sure I don’t miss this one?<\/p>\n
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I follow some obscure programmers. They almost never show up in my feed. Is that because I’m unlucky and I’m never around when they post, or is THE ALGORITHM hiding these tweets because it thinks they’re not interesting enough to be worth my time? It’s all very vague and the only way to know for sure is to do some deliberate testing. Even if I was in the mood to do some research, there are more interesting things I could be researching. So for years I used Twitter while experiencing this constant anxiety that maybe I was missing something important.<\/p>\n
The second tab on Twitter’s webpage is where you can see interactions with other people. This tab has two sub-tabs. The first shows you some tweets you “might have missed” since the last time you visited the page. These are always listed at the top, above everything else. Below that are messages where people are talking to you (or about you) in public. The second tab lists just these messages, without the “In case you missed it” section. So what happens is I’d click on the mentions tab, and then at the top I’d see something like:<\/p>\n
Fuck you and everyone who thinks like you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
That person isn’t talking to me, or about me. But their message was popular enough that THE ALGORITHM didn’t want me to miss it.<\/p>\n
I don’t know if this design is deliberate, but this strikes me as being a dark pattern<\/a>. I clicked with the expectation of checking my messages, and instead I’m shown content that doesn’t involve me at all.<\/p>\n