A Twitter eulogy and the complicated relationship with my X…

X isn’t Twitter. X isn’t even driven by human emotions any longer and is run by a management that doesn’t care about people, emotions or the dangers of propaganda. That’s why a lot of people who made Twitter grow in the beginning – real content creators – now meet on BlueSky. I do, too, but I still post on X. Here’s why…

Twitter beginnings…

When Twitter came out, I was not convinced. I’ve been blogging for a while and I’ve seen other short form content creation platforms come and go. I worked in Yahoo on Messenger and the front page and didn’t quite see the need for another way to tell the world a few sentences. The concept of Microblogging felt pointless.

What I liked about Twitter was the API and the platform idea. It was easy to build bots and you could access the platform via SMS, email, HTTP and many other ways.

I liked the whimsical and warm design of Twitter. You start as an egg avatar, the logo was inviting and I met a lot of lovely people who worked there. The food in the SF office was amazing when I visited them and it attracted good talent. I loved the fail whale and I really liked that things like #followFriday were invented by the community and endorsed by the product.

I also liked that you could not only post and react but also message folks in direct messages. This is something I still cherish and use. I sourced a lot of speakers for events that way, I met interesting people, got help from companies and even chatted with some celebrities from great shows I like (Star Trek, Qi…).

Modest successes…

I always fluctuated in the 60-70k followers range and as some of them are journalists and other good multipliers, I got quite some reach. So much so that around 2008 some of my tweets took down websites because of a traffic spike.

One on ones > deluge of “news”…

I always only glanced at the feed and concentrated on replying to comments and DMs instead. I get my news elsewhere and I’m OK with that.

X now…

Fast forward to now, 2025. Twitter is X and it is a dumpster fire. It’s run by a megalomaniac man child who openly supports fascists and the algorithm favours tech bros and growth hackers to real content creators. Interaction bait is favoured by the platform. Real content creation pointing to online resources to verify or “read further” is seen as less useful.

Gone are the days of whimsy. It feels cold, automated and not a community but a bunch of “go getters” wanting to write the perfect engagement update. Keep them occupied, keep them emotional, keep them annoyed. Spread hate and lies, who cares as long as the numbers go up.

The amount of shits I give to the news feed of X is zero bordering on negative numbers.

The only interaction I do on accounts I don’t know personally is point out racist, sexist or utterly wrong posts. I sometimes answer with the right information backed up by a trustworthy resource. I sometimes flag posts as inappropriate, knowing full well that this is pretty much pointless against an army of bots endorsing them.

So why not leave X?

I know that people appreciate my resources here, so I will keep pushing out to Twitter. I’ll also answer your DMs but I moved my reading and commenting to other platforms like LinkedIn, Mastodon and BlueSky. The latter really feels good right now. X does not. However, me leaving in a huff wouldn’t mean anything to the machine, except one more moderate voice gone.

I still stay because of my followers and some good DMs that still happen. The other part is that by adding content that’s not horseshit I might still play a small part in allowing people to find value.

X is a big bullhorn to the world and if we only let the horrible people shout into it, we shouldn’t be surprised if things go down the drain.

If people in a pub or train carriage shout racist, sexist or other hurtful things, I interfere and point out that it isn’t tolerated here. This takes courage, but it is incredibly important. Online we should do the same. Just because terrible people are successful doesn’t mean they are right.

Tags: followFriday