Envy you not having seen Derry Girls, which means you get to experience ALL of it as quickly as you like. One of the best series ever made. It never denies anything yet always comes out positive.
I am always genuinely surprised when people are still on twitter. Same when I see someone smoking an actual cigarette. A sort of 'oh, are we still doing this?' double take.
Hi! I have advice for Twitter readers who want to avoid extra snargey garbage! I've been using realtwitter.com for years now, and while the occasional ad does sneak through, you only get to see what you're expecting to see.
You can get the same result by pasting this into the search box:
I've stopped reading your Atlantic article about musk because I was thinking: oh my god, these people are responsible for how we see the world. During the middle ages, it was the church that controlled what we knew, today it's fucking Elon Musk. How embarassing.
I know people with your job really have no choice, so I’m not saying you should quit Twitter, but anyone else reading this I quit in Feb last year and was noticeably happier afterwards, even being someone with an addictive personality I felt almost no desire to start looking at it again even in the first week and a month later I deleted my account without a care in the world, it even saw other parts of my life improve (at least for a while) that I won’t talk about here
But yes, delete your account if you can, you won’t regret it I can assure you, I’ve been a bit of an evangelist for doing so and the few people who’ve taken up my advice, not one has gone back, you’ll be amazed you ever used to use it, let alone that you used to spend hours a day on there
I’m doing one of my irregular breaks, as I try to do with all potential addictions. So far, five days in, not missing it at all. No doubt my sexbot “followers” can wait…
I was horribly addicted for over a decade, then lost access to my account due to a broken-phone/2FA screwup, and... have missed it surprisingly little. I still check Facebook and Mastodon too much, but neither have the ability to suck away hours of my life like Twitter did. For that, I have YouTube - but I'll take watching hours of metalworking videos over hours of stupid political takes any day.
Great, great Atlantic article. I feel bad saying it's brave, which it is but really shouldn't have to be. I guess you've been through the social media cancellation/demonisation rodeo before, but I hope this doesn't provoke the same kind of reaction as Aaronvitch's satire has.
It's interesting that when they established devolution, they decided that the heads of the devolved governments would be called First Ministers, presumably to avoid giving the impression that these people could possibly be as important as proper Prime Ministers. So it's (extremely mildly) amusing that Welsh nevertheless uses the same term for both because we don't distinguish between "first" and "prime" in that way.
Your continuing use of X is really your business, but I admit to admiring your declaration of interest. I’m sure I would read your journalism if it was in a pamphlet of yore.
"Every time I log on now, my feed is full of previously banned rightwing influencers, and the “For You” tab reflects whatever the populist right talking point of the day is."
Yeah, it's incredibly noticable when I ocassionally check back in and in many respects has lost its key feature - where it previously had an advantage over BlueSky* was much better coverage of live news and sport. Whereas searching what was happening in Leeds last night gave nothing but a series of Tommy Robinson posts and grim racism from people who'd find Tommy a bit too much of a wet liberal. Sport is also now bad, but in a different way: trying to look up a live match gives nothing but adverts for illegal streams.
Still, many journalists use it a lot and so if Musk has bought it to influence them, rather than as a profitable venture, it might have achieved his goal.
*Bsky has a dreadful Twitter scold reputation, but if you mostly follow nerdy financial stuff it's not so bad, I promise.
Twitter (and the internet in general) has changed from being genuinely able to represent what’s going on to being a mass of bots and algorithms (and soon, LLM-generated plausible bullshit) all working to influence what’s going on.
Agreed on Twitter. I don’t mind a spectrum of opinion (or seeing offensive content) but I don’t need to check in and be fed seven tweets of Elon Musk complaining that there are too many black actors in Star Wars (which happened this morning).
Envy you not having seen Derry Girls, which means you get to experience ALL of it as quickly as you like. One of the best series ever made. It never denies anything yet always comes out positive.
Small edit: "Ben Anderson" (lines 2 and 4 of the a16z par) should be "Ben Horowitz"
Thanks! Have fixed.
PS good work on riling Musk and his minions with the Atlantic piece - looking forward to reading that in full
I am always genuinely surprised when people are still on twitter. Same when I see someone smoking an actual cigarette. A sort of 'oh, are we still doing this?' double take.
Hi! I have advice for Twitter readers who want to avoid extra snargey garbage! I've been using realtwitter.com for years now, and while the occasional ad does sneak through, you only get to see what you're expecting to see.
You can get the same result by pasting this into the search box:
filter:follows -filter:replies
Thanks, it makes such a big difference!
I’d forgotten how much I enjoy your writing. Thank you, Helen, for such a wide net of other topics to draw my attention away from the terror.
I've stopped reading your Atlantic article about musk because I was thinking: oh my god, these people are responsible for how we see the world. During the middle ages, it was the church that controlled what we knew, today it's fucking Elon Musk. How embarassing.
I know people with your job really have no choice, so I’m not saying you should quit Twitter, but anyone else reading this I quit in Feb last year and was noticeably happier afterwards, even being someone with an addictive personality I felt almost no desire to start looking at it again even in the first week and a month later I deleted my account without a care in the world, it even saw other parts of my life improve (at least for a while) that I won’t talk about here
But yes, delete your account if you can, you won’t regret it I can assure you, I’ve been a bit of an evangelist for doing so and the few people who’ve taken up my advice, not one has gone back, you’ll be amazed you ever used to use it, let alone that you used to spend hours a day on there
Important caveat: am not a journalist do not need twitter for work - i am massively happier since I stopped using it
I've been off Twitter for 10 days now (was a heavy user), haven't missed it a bit, 'self recommending' as Tyler C would say.
I’m doing one of my irregular breaks, as I try to do with all potential addictions. So far, five days in, not missing it at all. No doubt my sexbot “followers” can wait…
I was horribly addicted for over a decade, then lost access to my account due to a broken-phone/2FA screwup, and... have missed it surprisingly little. I still check Facebook and Mastodon too much, but neither have the ability to suck away hours of my life like Twitter did. For that, I have YouTube - but I'll take watching hours of metalworking videos over hours of stupid political takes any day.
Great, great Atlantic article. I feel bad saying it's brave, which it is but really shouldn't have to be. I guess you've been through the social media cancellation/demonisation rodeo before, but I hope this doesn't provoke the same kind of reaction as Aaronvitch's satire has.
Prif Weinidog translates as Prime Minister - sneaky eh?
Since no-one else has obliged, I'd pronounce it Preev Wine-ee-dog. But my Welsh is a bit rusty.
Pretty close - just a small tweak to the second word. Try Preev Way-knee-dog.
Yep. With the emphasis on the "knee" (the stress in Welsh is always on the penultimate syllable). Preev Way-KNEE-dog.
It's interesting that when they established devolution, they decided that the heads of the devolved governments would be called First Ministers, presumably to avoid giving the impression that these people could possibly be as important as proper Prime Ministers. So it's (extremely mildly) amusing that Welsh nevertheless uses the same term for both because we don't distinguish between "first" and "prime" in that way.
Your continuing use of X is really your business, but I admit to admiring your declaration of interest. I’m sure I would read your journalism if it was in a pamphlet of yore.
"Every time I log on now, my feed is full of previously banned rightwing influencers, and the “For You” tab reflects whatever the populist right talking point of the day is."
Yeah, it's incredibly noticable when I ocassionally check back in and in many respects has lost its key feature - where it previously had an advantage over BlueSky* was much better coverage of live news and sport. Whereas searching what was happening in Leeds last night gave nothing but a series of Tommy Robinson posts and grim racism from people who'd find Tommy a bit too much of a wet liberal. Sport is also now bad, but in a different way: trying to look up a live match gives nothing but adverts for illegal streams.
Still, many journalists use it a lot and so if Musk has bought it to influence them, rather than as a profitable venture, it might have achieved his goal.
*Bsky has a dreadful Twitter scold reputation, but if you mostly follow nerdy financial stuff it's not so bad, I promise.
Twitter (and the internet in general) has changed from being genuinely able to represent what’s going on to being a mass of bots and algorithms (and soon, LLM-generated plausible bullshit) all working to influence what’s going on.
Agreed on Twitter. I don’t mind a spectrum of opinion (or seeing offensive content) but I don’t need to check in and be fed seven tweets of Elon Musk complaining that there are too many black actors in Star Wars (which happened this morning).
It is genuinely broken - the trending topics no longer link to meaningful tweets and even search doesn’t work reliably for finding tweets on a topic.
And one black actor is playing TWO characters! Surely this is one of the horsemen (horseperson of unspecified gender?) of the apocalypse!
The "trending topics" feature on Twitter was always awful, as was any unbiased sample of tweets.
Who's clearly considered, not whose.
Thanks. I write this in my spare time, for free, so errors will occasionally creep in.
Thanks for both clarity and sanity!