I had thousands of people calling me all sorts of horrible things, threatening to do horrible things and generally being horrible. Willfull, ignorant people that tried to deliberately take things out of context, push their own agenda and create the most ridiculous straw man arguments.
Mastodon. It's not invite-only like Bluesky, it doesn't track you like Threads and it's federated like Lemmy (in fact, there's some crossover in some instances).
Putting blue checks at the top ruined Twitter for me. Every trending tweet gets spammed with 😂 emojis, right-wing disinformation, and transphobic hate speech. I got tired of scrolling past them just to start seeing normal commenters. Lemmy and Mastodon are better because the average user isn't a total fucking idiot with an agenda.
I was a beta tester for twitter.
Didn’t really “get” it then, and it never really clicked with me. I hardly used it, and when musk came in I deleted my account.
Too much Nazi shit and other forms of bigotry really. I just stopped posting my artwork there entirely and now post on bluesky and mastodon. Sometimes I use Facebook network shit to assure family that I am alive.
I barely used it to begin with. I closed my account entirely once Musk bought it. Sad chuckle when I see someone just now discover what a racist dirtbag he is.
Honestly, it was just too busy for me to keep up with. I'd check and there were 300 Tweets from all the people I was interested in since the last time I checked.
Twitter was sort of like a code-golf game when it was 140. Annoying, but it was their gimmick... it also made sense when theoretically people posted by SMS. 280 was freer but then it becomes more like any other social media... and people would just post as threads anyway, which was pretty much like a reddit or facebook post with the most confusing interface ever, and the ability to reply to or 'like' sentences individually, which is interesting but not super useful.
I wasnt really that attached to it to begin with so when Musk took over I saw the writing on the wall. He was going to turn it into an even worse shithole than it already was and I wanted no part in tacitly supporting it. Just like I basically left Reddit when it was clear spez and the board were hellbent on sudokuing the site with their boneheaded API decision and the fallout from it.
It's was like 2013 for me. I think it was when they fudged with the time lines so that you weren't seeing things chronologically but how the algorithm wanted you to see it.
I had a very decent account at the time too. Couple thousand followers (before the bot accounts started getting super bad) and like 30k tweets.
I still have an account, but I literally only use to to tweet stories to one podcast.
I still read it but I stopped posting as soon as Elon Musk bought it. I'm not creating content for free for a billionaire (derogatory) fascist. I'll tweet on Bluesky or Mastodon occasionally and still call it a tweet and if I want to say something longer I've got a blog nobody reads and if there's something I want to chat about there's Lemmy.
Twitter for me was always just a place to shout random ramblings to void. It didn't help that I barely followed at all what other users were saying. Always felt like I should, in fact, not just speak my mind, because in the recent years the site was really terrible at banning dipshits and the Musk takeover was a clear signal that things will never be getting better in that regard.
When Musk took over, the fact that the site started experiencing creaking at the seams when devs were laid off was a huuuuuuge red flag. My biggest IRL friend decided to leave Twitter after the Musk takeover. With nothing else to genuinely follow, I decided to GDPR-dump my past stuff and leave the site too.
I like Mastodon. It's like Twitter and Identica back in early 2010s when you could actually see random strangers posting random shit. Can see fellow shouters-in-the-void. And they're usually not dipshits.
I had an account since 2009 and mainly used it to post really ridiculous phrases that I found funny, like 'turnip thieves' or 'nursing burqa'. I tried posting various other things like programming related stuff, or pics and observations from my travels, and got absolutely zero engagement. But then in 2020 I was suddenly homeless in downtown portland after a breakup RIGHT when the Floyd protests started (I was driving right by the Federal center and the Elk statue like "huh, why are there are these cop cars and what are these people doing standing in the street?" and I needed up-to-date info about wtf was going on. Twitter was the best place to find that. Reddit was hours behind, fuck facebook, and local news is like a day behind, but local reporters were posting to-the-minute updates on twitter.
Then I started using it to follow some communities I'm into, like niche games and certain autoimmune diseases, and I liked the feel of personality people had. I felt like I got to know the personality of people who posted way more than on reddit, without the bullshit of facebook or whatever. I got sick of the horror of political slimebags by growing a block list of 8,000 accounts. But then: Elron. When Elron came it became clear that he was a massive douchebag and was going to destroy the site. I didn't wait around to watch: I downloaded my archive and just deleted my account.
They said that my account is locked for suspicious behaviour and I was to lazy to unlock it. Guess I wont gwt the extra entries for giveaways anymore, whatever.
I got banned because when Musk announced that Trump was unbanned, I replied to the tweet and linked the Trump account letting him know I looked forward to seeing him die in jail. I refuse to delete the tweet to remove my ban.
I've stopped being a reader on Twitter and rarely interact with anything there, but I have a big chunk of my audience still there, so it's still part of my posting schedule.
Was on twitter because 'it was hot'. I never discovered why, I found it even more annoying then open plan office spaces, lots of unwanted noice, no content. So I left and never looked for an alternative.
Since I left, never felt fomo, just yomo. Especialky with Musk taking over xitter I'm amazed not everybody went quitter.
I have not used a microblogging site for years, but I rediscovered it with Mastodon, which actually does have good content and isn't so full of chatter that the good content gets overwhelmed. It helps that you can subscribe to hashtags. I follow #Archaeology and get amazing and fascinating links. I rarely post, but I scroll.
I only use it for getting updates on public transport, but now apparently I made my account when I was under 13 and it's now completely locked. Despite being over a decade older they won't accept my ID to reopen and no way will I make another account.
Too many trolls making it nearly impossible to have a reasonable discussion or debate on pretty much any topic. And the lack of consistency in the application of the site's rules.
When I found I used it too much, the same day I went to the web-app to write a goodbye-tweet, but Twitter denied me acces, unless I'd give it my phone number. So I left anyway.
Never got that into it in the first place but the one thing that really turned me off is it felt like talking over billions of other voices who are a lot louder and more interesting.
I don't recall exactly when it was, but quite awhile ago I saw Twitter transitioning from a place people use internet aliases to talk about niche things into a place where official organizations like local city governments, news channels and even the fire station to put out information. As well as people using real identities including celebrities. That's when I bailed. It might have been around 2012? I don't know for sure. The same problem happened on Facebook.
Using these websites as a place to do serious things feels absurd to me. Like trying to have a discussion about politics on a neopets forum. Except it is a neopets forum that is mostly porn. At least Facebook doesn't have porn, but I don't like the idea of real identities online. Real identities are for offline in my opinion. Official organizations should use dedicated sites for their purpose. Or a self hosted mastodon instance where they don't allow sign ups if they really want this format of delivery.
I spent too much time on there before musk acquired it. After that, I put an app timer on to limit it to 15min a day, then down to 10. Now I go weeks at a time without opening it. The experience has changed greatly. It's a shitty buggy experience where the opinions of the dumbest people on earth are served to me with high priority. Pass.
Didn't really use it because the scientific and medical misinformation going around on the site was tiring to see. Then Elon Musk bought it and I could see the enshittification coming up. Put up a link to my new Mastodon account, waited like a month and then downloaded my data and deleted my account.
I'm still on Mastodon. Won't even look at Bluesky before they show they're serious about making it decentralised. And even if that happens, I'll still brace for the potential Google Talk 2: Electric Boogaloo.