The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging With Elon Musk’s X

Then stop already. Stop mentioning the name. Stop posting articles about it. Stop sharing articles about it on other social media.

You know what's immoral? Posting ragebait articles about a platform because you know users will engage.

This is your daily reminder to engage and boost Twitter alternatives such as Mastodon. It's not enough to ignore Twitter. We must build communities to draw in users, show them social media can exist without Elon or Zuck. Only when good alternatives exist, with content and people sought after, do users feel safe to abandon old platforms.

I made a burner to see for myself after using it for work a few years ago. It’s a complete dumpster fire now, way worse than before. Bots and shitty animated gambling ads everywhere. Porn bots and scammers are trying to follow you every 2 seconds. Elon’s dipshit musings/ragebait are forced into your feed even when you block him. Any tweets you make get zero engagement. remaining accounts are either bots, racists, fascists, or creators and celebrities moaning and/or hemming and hawing about leaving all the time because muh ego. It’s not even worth witnessing the spectacle.

It’s also fucking straight up broken half the time. Mastodon is a breath of fresh air in comparison even pre-Elon. Wish more would use it.

Lead by example. At least stop pretending that this news article/opinion piece belongs in a technology.

I joined Twitter fairly recently as Machine Learning Twitter is/was a thing, and I wanted to stay abreast of news from people like Andrej Karpathy, Chris Olah, Andrew Ng etc., especially since r/MachineLearning went down the shitter.

But I can't even - I log on and just instantly see ragebait posts from Daily Mail talking heads and bullshit.

Are there any better alternatives for this purpose?

The fediverse provides an alternative for people who care about using ethical products. Haven't tried threads/bluesky but they seem like more of the same. Unfortunately I don't think people care about the ethics of their micro-blogging platform; their biggest priority is having the largest soap box to shout from.

Does anyone here actually use it? I literally never made an account

I know a lot of people relying on it for sharing research papers and finding them. It's depressing to not have an alternative.

If torturing primates isn't enough for u what is,????

Do as you say please

I deleted that shit months ago.

I still use X for work and have noticed an increase in the amount of hate speech and racist content. Its started appearing on my feed.

Problem is legacy Twitter still has huge scale so it's not so simple to switch to something else if you need a big audience. It will take time.

Damn, this is actually quite compelling. I knew X/Twitter was bad, but didn't realize just how bad it has become. Thanks for posting.

I just wish the artists would leave, but no other social media allows porn too.

Deleted my X recently - not looking back.

I don't need a moral reason, I just think it's shit as it was before it rebranded

I never used Twitter in the first place because I had no idea what it was for.

Still don't.

Every single one of these things seemed to be "It's Facebook, but you can only do [gimmick]"

Ditched just over a year ago. My world is still as it should be. It's just a terrible app / organisation with gaming addiction

Lol, anyone who uses Twitter doesn't do it for morality. The mouth breathers are addicted to the drama and that's all there is to it

I finally left around the name change. Account is still there but I normally only check it when I'm texted a link, which rarely happens.

I'd really love to see what the twitter (or YouTube) feed is for a normal user. I don't doubt that the algorithms push extreme content, because that's what humans are naturally drawn to. After all, we want to look at car crashes aswell. However, I'm just really curious on why these people simply don't train the algorithm better.

Every now and then I get some right-wing(ish) video recommendation on YouTube and after I mark it as "not interested" it dissapears and it just goes back to recommending me stuff I'm actually interested in. Same with 1 minute long videos. I don't need to flag too many of them before it realizes it's not the content I don't like but the short lenght. In my personal experience twitter is way less agressive at pushing such content but even when it does the same solution works there too. "Not interested" and it stops showing up. Except for cat videos. Those never stop showing up no matter how often I mark it.