I’ll admit, Twitter can be a dumpster full of burning poop. It had become so rancid and flat out hateful that I left the platform.
In the early days, before the Woke mob was allowed to take over and began dictating what could be said and by whom, Twitter was actually a lot of fun.
It could be a time suck, but not the the extent that FaceBook was. I never had a ton of followers. Followers wasn’t my intent, I had a small group of friends on the platform that knew each other in real life. We “played” on Twitter.
We found the challenge of making our point in 120 characters stimulating. Dirty Haikus, or Limericks were shared among us and we made each other laugh. We were sarcastic, irreverent, and sometimes very blunt. We were friends. Sometimes it takes a real friend to metaphorically, “knock you upside your head,” by calling you out on something stupid you’ve done or are about to do.
In the early days, all of that was permitted and since none of us had thousands of followers, the reach was limited. As the platform grew, more oblique connections were made. Suddenly, someone that you met at a party would feel that they had the right to tell you what a bastard you were based on their reading of an out of context Tweet they read. Then their followers would pile on without knowing anything about the situation at all.
What these people forgot was that the initial small cadre of actual real life friends communicated in person and a snarky comment might have been the result of something that one person actually witnessed the other one doing.
Admittedly most of my followers were guys, and most of their followers were also guys. Guys bust each other’s chops on a regular basis, and the closer they are, the more brutal the teasing, or yanking each other’s chains can be. The small cadre of friends I followed and who followed me were pretty tight, there was a lot of trash talking which was no different on Twitter than if we were face to face.
What we forgot was that Twitter’s algorithm was presenting our engagement with each other on the platform as something of interest to other people that we didn’t know and who we’d probably never meet, much less hang with. Those people could follow us and read our comments.
The difference was that If my friends and I busted each other’s chops in a bar, someone else in the bar might have taken offense, but they had the social context of the bar and our body language as cues that we liked or even loved each other and social decorum prevented a complete stranger from commenting on what was essentially a private conversation between friends. Granted that “private conversation” may have been us yelling at the top of our lungs over loud music.
Twitter effectively removed all of the social cues and context, leaving only the words. We knew what we meant, but to an outside observer what was said could look pretty bad.
It was at this point that the judgement of others began to have a really nasty effect on our goofy conversations. We could say stuff like, “I don’t know how you get a date micro dick.” Where the reply would be, “Your sister liked it well enough and BTW you’re going to be an uncle!”
That joking screwing around would generate a firestorm of comments about hurtful demeaning words, and judgmental comments about irresponsible sex.
Then it got worse. Suddenly, the respondent would be a misogynistic, evil, CIS, privileged, male. Sometimes there’d be a day or two of hate directed at both parties for demeaning women and accusations of intent to rape.
The incessant comments along these lines were coming from complete strangers and any of the other core group of friends who might have commented on the initial exchange were subject to the same vitriol.
Almost inevitably some outraged SJW would report one or all of us to Twitter for offending them and we’d all be in a Twitter timeout. It progressively got worse. There was always someone searching for something… anything, they could be pissed off about. There’s nothing so dampening of free speech as complete strangers “Judging” every word or phrase. There were people on Twitter who felt it necessary to correct sentence structure and punctuation on Tweets where they were not invited to the conversation, didn’t know any of the participants, and didn’t understand the context.
Who does that? Those same people would take our ignoring them as some kind of victory. Or they’d say we were mean because we didn’t respond to their unsolicited advice. It became a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.
I personally got Twitter Jailed for asking one of these people, “Do we know you? If not butt out!” Apparently, the Twitter censors deemed that “Hate Speech”
So we got in the habit of censoring ourselves publicly and DMing our trash talk to each other. Then we thought, “If we’re having to DM anyway let’s just use text messages.” At that point, the fun group nature of our Twitter interactions died. Replacing it was group texts which made easing out of Twitter easier.
The thing we all miss is that Twitter provided other services. We’d see and share news articles we encountered on Twitter and comment to each other on them. It was great fun over breakfast to discuss the latest Twitter deuce Trump dropped over breakfast.
We do that now in group texts but it’s not quite the same. On Twitter, the news piece was linked in a way that we could view it on the platform and comment. Using group texts we have to pull the piece up on its originating platform and sometimes that doesn’t work quite right.
The group of friends considered and tried other platforms. But those platforms were being inundated with the same people who’d made Twitter simply useless. The same rules applied and everything said was subjected to scrutiny reserved usually for legal documents. We tried Parler and had a brief period of the kind of freedom we had initially with Twitter.
That is until Google, Apple, and Amazon decided that freedom of speech even non-political speech was a bad thing. When Parler was murdered by the big three, group text messaging was cemented as the goto communication method for my small group of buds.
Since Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, we’ve become curious. All of us are tech folks, and Twitter is very nice in allowing access to the stream of comments without having to create accounts. We’ve all been watching and reading tweets and have noticed that off color humor is returning. We’ve also noticed that things which could not have been said a mere 9 months ago are not only being said, but are also being promoted in the trends.
We’re asking if perhaps it’s time to create new Twitter accounts and go back to the fun we once enjoyed on the platform. My friends and I haven’t reached consensus yet. But we are sharing some of the funny memes that are reappearing and not being taken down instantly.
It would be fun to be able to share our camaraderie on a single platform without worry again.
The question is, do we want to have to deal with a bunch of assholes that want to be offended and literally search for anything to be pissed off about?
For the moment, we don’t. But the discussion is open.