I wish we would deprecate these "Goodby [Twitter | Facebook | Medium | Etc..] articles because a) the author usually assumes that people need to be educated and b) the authors have some axe to grind specific to them. Myself and people I know use these platforms with eyes wide open and find them useful. If a person doesn't like them, quit and spare us the dramatic exit article.
The “flounce” is a well-known feature of every online message board that ever existed. The loud, performative exit...usually followed by a shameful return after a few weeks of withdrawal. I’ve been watching people do it since the late 1990s.
So you're quitting the "quitting..." articles and writing a comment to everyone about why the 80+ people who upvoted the article are wrong to find it interesting? And that the author wasted their time?
If nothing else, the article felt genuine and coming from a place of them feeling a loss at having something they valued change so dramatically that it lost all value. I think we all feel that constantly in various ways with internet platforms and trends and can at least identify with where they're coming from. Even if we disagree with the specifics.
I wish people would not react with "well, it works on my machine" to stories of personal experience. Personal experiences have value - at least some, if they are well written and reflect important trends - even if they don't match yours. Dismissing it just because yours is different... well, it's fine, maybe it has no value for you. Claiming that it has no value to anybody ever is just hubris.
It's always the same complaints (invasion of privacy, I'm obsessed so it takes too much of my time, I get too many insulting DM's, or I don't like making them rich by providing content for free), never anything serious like Twitter is mining bitcoin in the background or Facebook makes it easy for ransome ware criminals to target you.
Your fears are yours, not a universal rule. For you, the worst Twitter can do is to steal some of your CPU time. For somebody else, it may be steal the actual time of their life, or enjoyment of it, and that may be more important for them. It's fine that it's not important for you, just don't try to claim it's the same for everybody. "Serious" is subjective.
> the phrase "I'm leaving the community" is quite old in internet years
Think, since 2020 there would be many "I'm quieting Internet" stories in the next few years posted by burnout Internet users, because mostly all of us (kids, adults & elderly) worldwide now preferably communicate online on a daily basis, staying at home due to pandemic.
Number of noobs[0] on the Internet, who never heard "Welcome to the Internet" greeting, actually drastically decreased.[1,2]
You're right. I forgot about that. I guess it feels like a big decision to leave for some and so they need to write about it and explore their feelings.
I actually found an issue that gave me real pause:
My Mother's Windows laptop had malware so I used a free version of Malwarebytes to clean it up. When I opened up my Linux based laptop and logged into Facebook, the very first advertisement was for Malwarebytes. I have never seen a virus ad or basically any other software advert before.
I've never logged into anything using my name or email on her laptop. Amazon's Alexis was listening in the background but I never said "Malwarebytes" outloud. I did talk out loud about viruses. My phone was off because I forgot my charger. My Mother's phone was also off.
I ruled out Alexis for a variety of reasons. I can think only one possibility. Google Chrome, which we both use, is the mostly likely culprit. Chrome could have accessed the camera when I downloaded Malwarebytes, used facial recognition and shared that data with Facebook. Web pages are sandboxed but Chrome itself has complete access to hardware.
> I actually found an issue that gave me real pause: My Mother's Windows laptop had malware so I used a free version of Malwarebytes to clean it up. When I opened up my Linux based laptop and logged into Facebook
Its simple: as Mother's laptop & your laptop connected to the same router IP/LAN, Facebook may recognize all PCs as "family" and decide to drop similar ads to all in the house; alternatively if your Facebook profiles connected as "family relationship", ads may enter from back door.
0-day issue you missed to fix firstly: replace Windows to Linux on Mother's PC right before connect it to the Internet.
Next issue was your try to "fix Windows" using "freeware antivirus app".
Thanks for clarifying that. Yes were on the same wireless network, so we probably all received Malwarebytes adverts. I did think of that family connection: Facebook probably realizes I fixed her computer without any detective work at all. Mom can't run Linux. The Malwarebytes free version (expires in 30 days) actually does a good job. I'm probably going to buy her a copy because she's 82 and doesn't understand she should say no to malicious Chrome extensions or other junk. In this case, the malware got her credit card number and some charges in San Francisco showed up, which the CC company was smart enough to decline.
I wrote this not because I was leaving, but because of a change in state of Twitter: they didn’t censor search results before, and now they do.
I thought that was worth a post, not my departure. Nobody except my handful of friends cares about little ol’ me being on Twitter or not.
Hopefully, many more people care about widespread censorship.
If you’re using a censored platform with eyes wide open, that’s also totally fine; I wrote this because I considered myself an expert Twitter user and was myself terribly surprised that they had started censoring search.
I imagine most people that use the site are unaware of it, which is the only reason this post exists.
>If a person doesn't like them, quit and spare us the dramatic exit article.
Would you have said the same about the Declaration of Independence? Sometimes it is a great step forward in dissent to outline why you find the current regime intolerable and why you are leaving.
Assuming you're not joking, I feel like most of these I'm quitting articles could have been written by some version of Microsoft Clippy + GPT-3, which can hardly be said of the Declaration of Independence.
