Bye Twitter

Today I deleted my Twitter account.

I used to get immense value out of Twitter. Often times, I hear other developers say ‘Twitter was always shit’ or something similar - but I vehemently disagree.

The gap Twitter -> Xitter left in my life

The gamedev community and tech twitter used to be fucking fantastic, if you curated who you followed on your account (a hard requirement!) your feed would be full of genuinely interesting tidbits of information - things you could only learn from other gamedevs or people making software.

After the stench/musk wore off, I observed as all of the interesting tech and gamedev people I knew either left X/Twitter to go to (anecdotally):

• Discord (60% of people)
• Mastodon (10% of people - I saw many proclaim they would do this, but in practice I find many are not active here)
• No where - they just left Twitter and stopped sharing short-but-insightful content entirely. When they have more well-formed thoughts, there are blog posts or whatever - but most interesting thoughts don’t reach that stage and are simply lost to the wind unless you are in direct communication with them.

Discord ate Twitter’s lunch

And that brings me to my point: most of my interesting tech/gamedev interactions are over Discord today, in private servers or DMs.

I have fantastic interesting technical conversations with other software engineers in Discord that you’d probably love to be part of - you can’t, because Discord is silo’d off so fuck you (I imagine the Discord company saying) - but the point remains.

Today, I just don’t get any value out of Twitter / X. For sharing my own work/interests, the people I’d like to share it with aren’t really on the platform either.

Quality and shit takes

It used to be the case that my Twitter feed was 80-90% interesting, quality content.

Today it’s more like 10%, with the remainder being made up of lukewarm advertisements, the latest hot-dump thread from some tech bro claiming how to build a multi-million dollar business using AI, or fellow American’s looking for opportunities to justify support of a traitor. I want nothing to do with it. I don’t want to be associated with it.

The highlight of my Twitter experience is professional Japanese programmers posting seemingly blissfully unaware inspirational quotes and cat photos, and for them I want to say a special thanks for brightening my days.

Bye Twitter

As a final act, I make the account sit empty with a single post suggesting to donate to animal well-fare.