Apparently I’ve had a Twitter account for gaming since Feb 2016, longer than I’d have remembered to be frank. I read Twitter fairly regularly to get my highly curated and ecclectic mix of gaming, ttrpg and language specific content (mostly German with a sprinkling of French and Spanish). So it’s with some consternation that I read various tweets and blog posts about the whole takeover controvery – and the significant number of “quitting Twitter” Tweets and posts.
I read Roger’s excellent post on this and I have to say I agree with his take. Just quitting the platform makes me feel like I’m abandoning a lot of good folk whom I follow on there. Most of my interactions on ‘social media’ are on Twitter of late – I just don’t have the time or mental bandwidth for Facebook, and I’m not finding any time to sit on Discord either. I may not post that much, other than the auto posts from this blog, but I do interact with other people’s content there more than anywhere else.
Another issue for me is platform inertia or even exhaustion. I’m just done with adding new or more social media-type platforms to my life. All these companies are in it for the money and they all do terrible things. It’s seems a lot of effort and likely not so effective to try and live a digital life free of intrusive data collection. I could have left Facebook multiple times over the years but most of my family are there and I want to be able to keep track of them and their updates – it’s the best and easiest place to do that. Again, I almost never post on FB thesedays but as a place to interact with one segment of my life it’s the best tool I have.
I get why some feel they have to quit Twitter over this, but for now at least, I’m going to keep interacting with the Twitter accounts I follow, to show I value their posts and to do my tiny personal bit to keep one small, positive corner of the platform going.
GamingSF 