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Leaving Twitter, Oh Boy (Update: Made You Look 🙃)
🕑 Added 2023-09-01 14:56:54 +0000 UTCEdit 2: Under normal circumstances I'd delete this post and try to act like I just never said anything, since I'm used to people kind of glossing over shit I say. But this isn't social media, and frankly I need to cut that shit out anyway, so I'm gonna smear this one all over my face and wear it.
Some folks (you know who you are, and thank you) talked some sense into me. Yeah, I still think everything that Elmo is doing is kind of dumb, but if I don't give him my information in the first place, then what the hell is there for him to take? I'll still gradually bow out of Twitter in favor of greener (bluer?) pastures, more than likely, but I'll keep the accounts, if just for the history. At least until they're inevitably swept from the internet without a trace either when Twitter's plug gets pulled, or I crawl into a hole and die and my stuff gets deleted due to inactivity.
I just wish this was all a rarer reaction for me. But I have an incredible propensity to give myself over to panic whenever I feel like my livelihood is being threatened. And I live with someone who keeps a really heavy thumb on privacy/infosec news, whose opinion I've held in perhaps too high a regard at times. So when something comes down the pipe and I get told about it, I go full Chicken Little and enter the discuss --> panic --> panic post --> regret --> delete cycle. I'd like to delete those last four steps from the pattern, but I'm still working on it.
Sorry to dump this all here. I know most of you didn't really sign up for Sad Time Word Vomit Hour, but I felt it was important to say that hey, yeah, I was dumb, don't listen to me. Ever.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be over in the corner bandaging my pride and trying not to hyper-fixate on my shitty, guilty conscience.
Thanks for listening.
EDIT: I have more thoughts now that other people have clarified things and I've had more time to think about it while I stream, but I'll have to save it for when I'm not ass-deep in boss rush.
I despise that this always happens on Fridays, my most stress-heavy day of the goddamn week.
The initial tomfoolery: I don't know, it's probably a waste of time to make a post about this. But most people have probably found this account through Twitter and given the galloping fuckery that's descended on that platform lately, the news might not even reach you there.
That said, I'm getting archives of my Twitter accounts and removing them on September 20th. If you want to know why, give this article a read, but the long and short of it is this: The melon man gave himself permission to scrape biometric/employment data, most likely for a premium job search feature or what have you.
I behave myself on Twitter for the most part but I don't much care to have that shit attached to my real-life data, and I'm sure he's going to use many levels of obfuscation to keep people from keeping that data private.
More than that though, I'm tired of waking up every other Friday and having a brand new heart attack all over again over new overreaches on Twitter right before I have to stream. This is way too much grief for me, and I'm being given almost nothing of value in return for the extra heartache. I've had my main account for 16 years, and the absolute havoc he's wreaked on it in as many months is more than I can take.
I realize that on a free platform, the users are the product. But like... I would have been happy to kick Twitter a few bones a month a long time ago just to avoid all of this. So I'm just not gonna be Elon's product anymore. He's a shitty caretaker.
Find me on Tumblr. Or Bluesky. Or Cohost. Or pretty much every other platform. I've got whole lists of them.
