I’m sick and tired of Twitter. From the addiction of scrolling to those bot/NSFW accounts that keep following me for no reason. In this article, I’ll go in-depth as to why I’m uninstalling Twitter from my mobile phone and why you should too.
The algorithm and my addiction
For some reason, in March of this year, I intentionally wanted to get addicted to a social media app, so I picked Twitter, hoping I would never catch any rage/interaction bait post. It was most likely because I was depressed during that month and wanted something to cope with it. As soon as I opened the app and made an account, I saw some posts. They weren’t all that interesting as I wasn’t following anyone yet. Soon enough, I started following Minecraft-related stuff, and some of my friends as well (those who are brave enough to not make their accounts private).
Now, in my Twitter feed, I saw posts catered more towards me. I didn’t comment on all of them, but the topics were quite personal. The algorithm figured out the way I felt and my decisions/discoveries. It’s creepy how an app can find out everything about you, and somehow, this has been normalized. Now we’re used to this kind of thing. Even YouTube is like this: it takes one interaction (whether that’s a like or a comment) for the algorithm to be able to recommend something similar to that topic.
During my “journey”, I also started getting interaction bait tweets. For those who don’t know what those are, they are provoking tweets that try to get everyone’s attention. Tweets like “Do you support the LGBTQ community?” and “Name the most famous German” started appearing in my feed somehow. I can’t stress enough how divisive this can turn out to be. For example, if we take tweets like the first one I mentioned, people will rage at each other to make sure their opinion is always right, and it’s non-stop too!
Drama and why social media sucks
I’m one of the lucky (or unlucky) ones who was able to witness the mess that was the GeorgeNotFound and caitibugzz situation. What I hate about Twitter (but people on the internet, at this point) is that when someone shares (or fabricates) allegations against a popular figure, people immediately the person who went against the celebrity because, according to the internet, the other person doesn’t get to share their side of the story.
Because of you, yes, you people who immediately pick their side without hearing from both parties, an innocent person’s online reputation has been worsened. I’m not going into detail regarding that, but GeorgeNotFound may have lost some sponsorship opportunities now that there’s been some “drama” where the only people present are angry people who only care about how many views and likes they get on their controversial tweet.
Sometimes, I was able to discover tweets where people wish for someone’s downfall (I mean it in all meanings). How is that acceptable when they do nothing but love everyone? I have yet to understand that, which will never happen because this is simply outrageous! Social media was supposed to connect us, not divide us even more than we were already. I’m sorry to say, but decentralized communities (eg. Discord servers, subreddits, and forums) that focus on a certain topic are still better than these social media apps. There’s a reason why, somehow, I still prefer apps/websites like Discord or Reddit, and it’s because you can decide what topics, communities or groups matter to you. When groups are decentralized, it’s always better.
Those bot accounts are everywhere!
This may not just be a Twitter problem (in fact, this happens on Instagram as well), but it’s always relevant there. Twitter has a huge bot problem and, even if Elon “allegedly” said that his team would fix the issue, that never happened. This even caused Elon to add a $1 fee for new accounts to tweet, which is stupid. Why would you ever do that on a platform you want to be profitable? I mean, I guess that’s the goal with these websites these days.
My account keeps getting followed by some random bot accounts, and most of them are NSFW. I always block them, but they keep re-appearing. I’m tired of it because I’m not even interested. Some of these accounts even pretend to interact, when they are there just to get your attention (which, in my case, is an irritating one). This is not a problem of the platform, I’d say it’s people’s fault. There’s a part of people who use these apps just to advertise whatever they want people to use, so they will create an account and annoy as many people as they can, all to promote their NSFW profile.
In conclusion…
I feel like these are the main issues that plague Twitter and its community. It’s too much for me to stand on, and I don’t want to be stressed for a platform that doesn’t even want to improve. From now on, I will only use Twitter to share articles like these or any new videos I’ll upload on YouTube. I have also uninstalled the app to prevent useless notifications from people I’m not even interested in (those bot accounts, I mean), but to also make sure I won’t be addicted to this thing ever again.
If you feel like you want something similar to Twitter, you should check out Mastodon. Mastodon is a decentralized social network, meaning there are multiple instances of it. These instances can be connected to each other, which is great. I have an account there as well, if you want to follow me there.