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I would love one of those “Twitter is great” people to post a live view of their current feed for a couple of weeks so the rest of us can see just how great their experience is.

Whenever one contemplates the statement "staying something made you worse" he is necessarily confronted with the possibility of "one staying somewhere made somewhere itself worse".

The TruthX will set you fee

So many more pernicious worse people! Driving humanity apart for so many more sinister reasons. Racism, but also, I think the merchants of FUD get away with a lot because of the quagmire of reality, the intransigent losers they deliberately beget. Belligerent braying hounds of hell. Preying on us.

Exactly this.

Its slurs (works with or without the ‘) Its biases rub off on you and you start assuming the same things the bigots do

And it comes from all sides. Growing up here, as a little immigrant kid of immigrant parents, I had a slightly outside view. This country is one of the most propagandized places on earth. Constant, crushing propaganda. It's everywhere. Ads, magazines, tv shows, etc. Constantly.

I don't remember what the last straw was for me, but I moved everything over here. I still have an account, because I have been there way before that guy, and he won't own it forever, but I'm not active there now.

There are a few people who feel they are catching valuable evidence over there. Maybe. Does a deleted tweet hold up in court as evidence that someone knew something or someone they then deny? Still, they ought to know there’s a risk, like secondhand smoke to being in that environment.

Someone staying on X is like a non-German citizen remaining in Berlin after 1939. They may claim they're only there for the world-class museums and restaurants, but no matter how tightly they close their eyes, they're still participating in the surrounding horrors and contributing to what's to come.

spot on Anil

It's really good. I don't think it's mean at all, in a way, it is a kindness to try to warn folk. (last pg. fix hatetmongers and ?", - no comma needed)

I don't think people are mean enough to many of these lazy folks

Publish it now. People need to see this. There are alternatives, and voluntarily handing over your personal news/media curation to a racist, fascist weirdo *who wants to influence how you think* is just obviously a horrible decision, for anyone who thinks about it for more than a few seconds.

whenever CSA scandals come to light people wonder why parents chose the institutions, the parish, the hockey coach, their family, etc. despite knowing. x and meta are just another example of adults choosing their own perceived status in a group over children’s safety.

It was prescient. Someone saw the Twitter remake coming.

an accurate way of what we all complicit to..

There’s no such thing as being too mean to fascists.

spoken like a man with no extra usage tbh

it's harsh but i don't think it's mean in any way

Sometimes you need to be blunt amd truthful with people.

Silly and offensive. It's the same sort of rot you deride on twitter, ignorantly creating "us" and "them". No, I am not defending twitter. I'm rejecting self-congratulatory bullshit and culture warring.

Not mean. Truthful

Bravo. Left X when Bluesky first formed. Literally saved my state of mind

Also, all you people still publishing on Substack, why? Is it just that you like your Nazi neighbors on the Nazi Blogging Network? Or is there another reason you're there?

A superb piece of analysis.

Oh yeah, me too brothur *the action*:

What do they teach in theater school?

Tapping the sign bsky.app/profile/dyla...

Not mean. Accurate.

The problem is it doesn’t matter if you’re on X because you’re still going to hear the batshit coming from it in our Media.

So leaving twitter made me better? Sweet

Haaaah! I am going to write “had pieces killed by an overzealous editor” on my cheek

Lolol

I appreciate the sentiment but this would be adding content to the platform. It would be giving people reasons to stay, because it would justify their inaction. Motivating people to gtfo that site is so much more important because it furthers every single organizing goal we might have.

Yeah I do think a harm-reduction framework is a good approach in general. It was what I had in mind with the suggestions in this piece anildash.com/2026/02/23/t...

Free therapy

Now referring to all of my unsent post drafts as the “Disney Vault”

I can relate. I have SO MANY notes I’ve never posted, nor sent to people who won’t receive the message of them. It’s not that I don’t write. It’s that I don’t share because I have no sense that it will accomplish anything but make things worse with some relationships and be ignored by everyone else.

Thank you for writing - and sharing - this. A version of it could be a zine, printed, folded, illustrated (a bit), and passed around. We need to reach more people, IRL. Whether you have the time (etc.!) to do that or not, thank you for writing it.

And some of us just... decide not to publish altogether. And even then, I end up saying stuff wrong, or badly characterized,so I pass for worse than I try to be.

Publish it Anil.

Perhaps so. But it’s hard to tell once the horse has bolted.

What's really galling about this is that the people who are being deranged by Twitter and sure that everyone else is captured by media bubbles. Not only are they immune to the deluge of propaganda, but we're all rubes for not subjecting ourselves to it.

No, they won’t. The reason is as Anil puts it: “I know you think you're the exception, and you're immune to it.”

Correct, I think you misread something.

its great. Every defense of Twitter reminds me more and more of Biederman Und Die Brandstifter.

Ah good tactic

#NotMeanEnough ?

I thought this piece from last year made your point well: www.aaronrosspowell.com/3m2cpq6rwzk2v

This is very well said. ❤️

It's too kind.

You literally can't be mean enough.

is this published somewhere besides these screenshots? or that's what the "to do" is

I think it's a great piece, so glad you decided to share.

By the title alone I can already tell that if it ain’t the right amount of mean then it must be not mean enough

Yeah, that's a fair point

Let me give you an example of how being exposed to RW comments have made me worse. When I first saw RWers punctuating a mean or cruel statement with a 🤣 emoji, I was horrified-- they were using cruelty as a substitute for real humor. Then I started saying cruel things to them, punctuated by 🤣

It is not too mean. It is just right and long overdue

Publish. Please.

There's communities that I value who never left, so I didn't either. Network effects are real and hard to fight, man. I have no idea why people who left would want to go back. Maybe for terrible maps and the satire accounts? But it is what it is. It's not like I haven't been abused on all of them.

It’s…..the truth. Gave up X, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon. Do not miss them.

I still TO THIS DAY don't understand - where does the assumption come from that if you are using Twitter, you are inevitably just under the algorithm. I have my Following / Recent, almost all of them are people I know in real life, those are the only ones I actually care about.

You still can

i call them out regularly bsky.app/profile/dany...

Fair enough. As long as we aren't actively engaging on the platform, those are valid reasons not to delete the account. But at some point, we have to cut ties… I don’t see any other way for this madness to stop unless X keeps losing its users, and with them, its relevance

Do it anyway

When I started using Bluesky, it very quickly dawned on me how much of my feed on Twitter was others' quote-dunking, and how much it was influencing my mental state. Just post after post of snarky retorts to people saying something brainless or vile for attention really dragged me down.

It isn't mean at all. It's brutally honest.

Eh, lots of people think they're immune to propaganda and try tough it out for "branding & reach" when people get sick because crowding invasive gobtrolls deliberately cough on them and a flu becomes pneumonia it's the same sort of kindness to try shake them out of "stoic" denial to go to a doctor.

Read them for filth Anil, they're sick.

I know it's not the best analogy, but there's a reason I avoid ads at almost all costs (even to the point of using ad blockers). I believe I'm smart enough not to be affected by ads, but being inundated by them at every turn definitely affects me, whether I think so or not...

youtube.com/shorts/vZ49X...

is there a written non-screenshotted version of this? maybe a small blog post? (: I'd love to share that

Thank you for saying this. Please publish anyway!

Spot on. Thanks for writing this, Anil! 👏

This applies to YouTube as well. There is so much content on there that passes casual observation as being “apolitical” or “centrist”, but which launders extremism with “reasonableness” language. And then there are the countless “self-help”, coaching, and “interviewer” pseudo-intellectuals on there.

Seems right.

GET OUT OF THE NAZI BAR! Even if you're not actively engaging in nazi stuff, you are STILL IN A NAZI BAR and the nazi bar benefits from your presence there. Whatever you are doing in the nazi bar can be done someplace that isn't a nazi bar.

Bravo

I went back to threads for a hot minute after the native Bsky app forced age verification. I couldn't even stomach that algo feed for more than a few days before I came back through a third party app. It's not just Twitter, any algo fed SM is pretty toxic.

Yeah, in the month since, I could come up with a dozen more.

Too mean, nah!

Great!

Today I am more inclined to consider that they still had some lingering ideas of how ugly to others it would have looked to respond in any other fashion. At that time, before Musk and Trump ripped the band-aid off and showed that they could fly their 'freak' flag freely and without shame.

you're nicer than I would have been

Brutal, but fair, especially that last bit.

Not mean at all, just accurate.

Completely on point. My crazy stepson gets most of his dumbest ideas from X.

We know why this is: the Space Nazi cannot accept his daughter having transitioned, and then disowning him for condemning her.

There are a lot of assclowns still there who need to read this.

👏

It bothers me that people I thought I knew will still defend Musk. We saw the same things and they will still say, "maybe he was just joking?" In 42 years of being on this planet, I've not once felt the need to joke in that way. Why should one of the most visible people in the world do it?