So Long, Twitter

Of all the things Twitter could do to drive me away, they’ve done two of the top-tier items over the past week or so.

First up, we have “Yes, Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first”:

When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.

Biden’s tweet, in which he said he would be supporting his wife in rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles, generated nearly 29 million impressions. Musk, who also tweeted his support for the Eagles, generated a little more than 9.1 million impressions before deleting the tweet in apparent frustration.

Today, my Twitter feed is a lot of Musk, the petty man-child who fired an engineer for telling him the truth – that his popularity was down and therefore his tweets were receiving lesser engagement. Clearer evidence that the man could not engineer his way out of a paper bag (or perhaps a cave in Thailand) has never been presented!

Anywho, I can just ignore Twitter and only open the app when I care to be bombarded by the Musk Show, right? Nah! Twitter has made a change in recent weeks to show me NON. STOP. PUSH. NOTIFICATIONS. Seemingly they are all about garbage trending topics which do seem relevant to my interests, but these are interests I want to follow when using Twitter, and not get push notifications begging me to open the app. The crux of the problem is…I did not ask for this?

So now I’m faced with the choice of uninstalling the Twitter app entirely, or disabling notifications. I would keep it installed, if only to occasionally visit that hellsite and revel in the schadenfreude of it all. I also like to receive notifications from Twitter based on some Lists I created a long time ago; these are notifications I have actively sought out and wish to receive. Unfortunately, Twitter has polluted that stream of content and engagement that I want from them with their own junk. Uninstalling Twitter would cost me something, so it sucks that the app is giving me bogus push alerts all day long that I cannot opt out of¹.

All of this is which to say - find me over on Mastodon @[email protected]!