TL/DR: I have deleted my twitter account but you can still find me on the following networks:
A long time ago I joined a social network called twitter, in the early days it had Follow Friday (#ff) and other fun stuff. The geospatial and map making community was really strong too. On twitter we swapped tips and maps we celebrated achievements and occasionally argued over what made a good map. But twitter got more advanced, more sophisticated and it seemed with each iteration my experience of it got worse, my feelings about it were less and less positive.
The algorithm ‘improved’ and slowly it seemed I was bombarded not with content from interesting people and contacts but meaningless stuff. Yes, I could change to the following feed but it was clear the platform cared more about advert views and engagement. I blame myself in part for not being strong enough to resist the default feed, but hey the news content seemed good…. The geospatial community faded for me and some of us moved to other platforms (Mastadon, Threads, Bluesky).
It’s strange that platforms don’t seem to care what positive ‘engagement’ is, all they care about are clicks and views. Too often rage bait posts (tweets or otherwise) get the attention of the algorithm feeding the monster in all of us.
The final straw really came when ‘he’ took over, I like space and electric cars and stuff… but not him. Any time I am exposed to his views I wish I wasn’t. So, about that time I put my twitter account into hibernation hoping his ownership was a blip and that he would sell up. It wasn’t, he didn’t and today I had had enough.
The good news is that I am a little wiser and we have options to seek out positive engagement. I am on Mastadon, BlueSky, Instagram and Threads I haven’t escaped the algorithm but I have escaped a lot of the bots. Have I escaped billionaires with hard right views? I am not sure on one of those, but at least these platforms seem to have boundaries and tools to manage my feed a lot better.
Lastly whilst the Guardian decision today has validated my feelings it wasn’t the reason!
