Farewell Twitter - but only because the UX now sucks

I miss the cute whale more than the content.

I have finally moved on from Twitter and closed my account. In my case, it is because the UX degraded my experience to the point that it was too much hassle to work with the app. I had previously closed my account twice over the years I have been using the app, because when I got to around 10k users the experience was not very good. So I just restarted with a new account, followed people and gradually built up my feed again.

This time has been a little different.

I have, until recently, held the unpopular view that the Twitter user experience had improved since Musk took over. I found, for example, that muting, which was previously hit-and-miss, started to work very well. The word “Musk” never appeared in my timeline. This meant I may have missed the occasional tweet from my friends who are perfume collectors (I mean you, Brendan and Meredith) but I doubt it.

Also, blocking was much more effective. And I supported the recent changes to blocking - enabling a blocked person to see tweets but not interact with them - because I had a friend who was horribly bullied by a clique at work without her being able to see what they were up to or collect evidence. So, on the whole, I thought that change was acceptable. I also noticed that the For You experience was better, so long as I continued to interact with the algorithm and tell it about tweets I did not want. In general, so long as I curated my feed carefully with mutes, blocks and hints to the For You feed, all was pretty good.

But even with that curation, I managed a list of “Priority” users - about 200 of them - and that was first - and often the only - tab I looked at, along with any notifications which told me if there were replies or comments I should pay attention to. However, recently every tab - including my Priority list and my For You tab has been infected with numerous tweets I don’t want.

I don’t mind the adverts in general - a small price to pay for the service. However, I did very much dislike the clickbait, unlabelled, chumbox-style ads that rolled out on October 23. Although I could not block them or dislike them, there were not so many that they got in the way of the overall experience: an inconvenience rather than a barrier. More recently, however, this kind of unblockable ad has proliferated. And increasingly, the content is political and at best uninteresting to me. It became much more of an irritation.

Even worse, I would open the app to see the badge showing I had some notifications - often 10 or more. But they were not replies or comments, nor were they “promoted posts” (basically another form of advert). These were “recommended posts,” and many of them were completely unsuitable to my interests. Despite the care I had taken in curating my feed, I now found myself facing not only content inserted into it but also notified to me as if it were important. And worse again, despite my attempts to curate these posts, they remained completely irrelevant to me and took up substantial space in the UX of my feed.

I know many people have left Twitter because they dislike Musk. And I can’t blame them. His social attitudes are horrible, and his personal attacks on people who disagree with him are often very offensive and cruel. But I know plenty of other tech leaders, and I am well aware that if I turned off the technology of everyone whose politics or personality I detest, I’d be back in the Middle Ages. (As a historian, this is something I personally might enjoy until the parasites set in. Perhaps I could take Ivermectin.)

Nor am I averse to views I don’t agree with, although some of the recommended posts were deliberately egregious, from people like Andrew Tate. But I do subscribe to The Economist, which is way to the right of my politics. It is, in fact, my primary source of news. I take it in print, so the articles are mainly long-form and about events of the previous week. I don’t feel I need daily news, but I also find I don’t miss much! I did subscribe to the conservative magazine The Spectator for 24 years, exactly because I wanted to understand what “the other side” thought. I eventually cancelled my Spectator subscription when Boris Johnson was editor, not because of the politics, but because the writing had become tedious and predictable. It took me a while to cancel because under Johnson, some aspects did improve (like Twitter with Musk) - book reviews, restaurant reviews (although still not at the heights of Nigella Lawson’s writing in the 80s), art, and music reviews were often excellent. I kept an electronic subscription for a year or so, but then felt I wasn't missing anything that I couldn't get from my beloved London Review of Books.

I also hear that many people feel the Tweetstream has become an open sewer of fascist, misogynistic, racist, homophobic, and transphobic abuse. That’s quite possible, but I have never interacted with the unfiltered, uncurated feed - and I can’t imagine why anyone would. There are a lot of very nasty people out there: in the pub, in the workplace, in the home … but I keep my distance.? Sometimes that’s difficult: there are members of my extended family who were at the January 6th riot. You can, as they say, choose your friends but not your family.

With Twitter, I tried one more trick. I created shortcuts to friends’ profiles and saved them in a Tab Group so I could read my top 20 or so friends without much interference. But even then, the uncurated, unwanted stuff started to creep in. And besides, this didn’t scale.

I am trying BlueSky. It’s ok. Not great. Creating a priority list requires coding, which is ridiculous. Easy enough for me but hopeless for most users. And all lists are public, so I created one and promptly un-created it. I don’t want people to know who’s on my priority list ... or not. I do like the starter packs: I have made some very cool discoveries and new friends. Maybe it will grow on me.

The most important lesson for me is that I am not missing Twitter at all. It’s gone and I never needed it. One less distraction in the day and more time to read.