So long, and thanks for all the tweets

Twitter has been going downhill ever since Elon bought it. But things like unbanning Nazis and removing actual verification didn’t directly affect me so, shamefully, I still kept reading Twitter every day.

You see, although there’s a lot of talk about leaving that hellsite, there are lots of people holding on, perhaps worried about losing the vast number of followers they have collected, or thinking things would go back to how they were eventually.

I am a Twitter completionist. This means that for as long as I can remember, probably since not long after I joined in 2007, I have read every single tweet on my timeline. This was helped enormously by third-party Twitter apps, especially since they started keeping your place in the timeline (shoutout to Manton Reece for inventing Tweet Marker).

Twitter was where I would get most of my news, either current affairs or just news about cool new tech. Using a third party app (mostly TweetBot, though I flirted with Twitterific for a while), meant that there was no algorithm and no ads – just a chronological list of tweets from my curated list of accounts that I followed.

That all changed about a day ago when Twitter removed access to third-party apps. They still haven’t explained it or confirmed it is new policy, but their silence on the matter speaks volumes. Elon obviously decided that people using third party apps and not giving him as revenue were fair game to ‘sacrifice’.

Spending just a few minutes on the official Twitter app was enough to convince me I won’t be using it daily. It disrespects your choices by forcing you back into the algorithmic timeline on every launch, and the chronological timeline is chock full of ads. Even if there are still people there that I want to hear from, I don’t want to do it like this. I’ll probably jump in every now and then just out of morbid curiosity, but it’s no longer a big part of my life.

So long, and thanks for all the tweets.

You can find me on Mastodon.