Farewell, Twitter. It hasn't been pleasant.

[ksleet]

I've finally realized that Twitter was designed by a cabal of sinister alien superintelligences trying to come up with the best possible way to generate hatred and mistrust, ultimately leading to global thermonuclear war so they can move in afterwards and steal all our Hello Kitty merchandise without a fight. Absurd, you say? Just look at the facts:

1. 140 character limit, so it's impossible to get across a thought with any subtlety, and any attempt at complex expression can be misunderstood if someone tries hard enough.
2. Broken comment threading, so it's impossible to maintain a coherent conversation.
3. You may think you're just chatting with a few friends, but at the click of a button some bored person with a hundred thousand followers can sic an angry mob on you. At that point every word you've ever said in your life will be picked over and used against you.
4. No action is taken against abuse or harassment, so threats and bullying are rampant and ignored unless you've got friends in the media.
5. A blocking system designed to generate hugboxes and echo chambers, with the result that contrary opinions that do slip through cause a violent allergic reaction.
6. A tweet filtering system which creates the impression that we unwashed masses can communicate with, or even disagree with, our betters, while in reality that communication is unidirectionally curated to eliminate such a disgusting possibility.
7. Hashtags create alleged "mass movements" that at best dissipate any urge to take real-world action and are forgotten within weeks while the original cause of the problem remains, and at worst act as a perfect system for funneling trolls towards their targets.
8. Poisonous mixture of anonymity, pseudonymity, and real identities in constant proximity makes "doxxing" an actual threat that can be made, because there's no actual cultural focus in one direction or the other.
9. And finally, it's part of a broken larger culture where the reaction of employers to people complaining about online disagreements isn't to laugh and hang up, but to fire the targets of the complaints.

Everybody on Twitter is paranoid and violent and crazy, but it's not because they're fundamentally bad people. It's because the environment has driven them crazy. It's wrong, it needs to stop, and I'm doing my part by getting the hell out of there.