this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2026
463 points (97.3% liked)
Technology
87315 readers
4336 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I stopped when it became X. However it was full of racist, bigotry and hatred before then as well.
I used it to keep up with some content creators and tech companies but I did so by getting an API key and running a cli that only pulled down messages from who I followed. Made it much more bearable and useful.
Since the Xittification, API keys are expensive and I've either followed them elsewhere, or mostly just given up. Some dropped it, but when you have thousands to millions of followers on a platform, from their side, it's hard to lose that audience.
I used to like Twitter when it started, following people and small companies/communities was super easy and the 140char limit nice and terse for both the posters and the ones following. Then it shat the bed and then it got bought out and while some still post there because of followers, most have left or just disappeared.
In the case of content creators, you go where your audience goes. Almost all of the content creators I watch went back to twitter and almost exclusively post only live notices and social updates. I don't have one that has a good opinion of the platform but, there's a much larger audience there so therefore they stay.
Visibility is everything, and there are many steps between following you off the platform and not engaging with your stuff. Many will not follow a creator to an alternative platform if it means having to juggle an additional network, they will just let that creator fall out of their interest group.
I know for a fact I wouldn't be on lemmy if I still used reddit, so any content creator I followed there I dropped. It is too annoying having to juggle multiple social media platforms.
I don't use twitter either, its blocked by choice on my DNS blocker but, the majority on the platform are not a pedo, regardless of the owners of it. It's still really the only valid mainstream option for content creators. Do you have a better option? Because I know bsky or lemmy sure as hell aint going to get the job done for them (they have already tried that and went back due to lack of usage.)
its a circle, creators aren't going to leave the platform because consumers are there, consumers aren't going to leave because creators are there. The only real hope of that changing is either twitter screwing up so hard that they can't stay, or a superior alternative being made that allows both the creator and the viewer to leave at once, so far bsky has come to be the closest but has still fallen short.
edit: changed tone and wording to be less aggressive.
Twitter was useful for getting updates about sports during games - for example, an update on whether a player who was injured might return to the game, or sometimes, more detail on something weird that happened (you'd be shocked at how poorly informed people in the arena are, compared to those watching on TV). A lot of this depends on who is feeding the info, though, and the more recent beat reporters for our favorite hockey team haven't been as active on Twitter, so I closed my account after Musk bought it. Haven't really missed it.
But even today, every article about something that happened in a game will embed a Twitter link for video. Like there's no other possibility - just Twitter.
I'm not defending this, just saying that sports use it extremely heavily.