What's wrong?
There are about 100 reasons but, as this is a technical site, I'll highlight some specific technical concerns:
- No real changes - It seems like a minor thing but the "undo" button was somehow what's touted as the new, important change that'll revitalize the service. This makes no sense to me because micro-blogging services (what these things used to be called before Twitter) were specifically created to avoid this kind tedious versioning nonsense that details changes to a given post. I recall seeing an exceptionally dry story about Wikipedia versioning so I can't wait for news people to fail at explaining this to their audiences.
- The algorithm - This is not a new problem but I somehow held out hope that this would get better: always giving a mic to the most incendiary folks and pushing their posts to the top. That wasn't a bug for Twitter leadership, that was a feature, and one you couldn't turn off. I don't see new policy to create improvements on that front. Quite the opposite.
- Not even really social - I tried on many occasions to have conversations with people on Twitter in some format and never succeeded. I recall a journalist tried to interview the old CEO via Twitter and how that completely failed. It's because the structure is fundamentally confusing.
- Poor interface - I greatly disliked using the Twitter website and even looked into ways to make it show up as the mobile interface on my standard web browser. When they said "mobile first" I feel like the website was an afterthought.
Tom's has the top 3 - I haven't had great luck with Mastadon but I do think it's the future and plan to come back to it in the months ahead. They've reported the #1 option "CounterSocial" is having some slowdowns perhaps because of the flood of people already moving off Twitter. We can't say for sure because Twitter has difficulty counting active users.
And here's 7 more.
How to close it down
There are several ways to leave the service including:
- Setting your account to private (which will make posts only visible by followers)
- Deactivating your account (still present but inactive)
- Deletion, where after 30 days everything gets wiped)
There is a fourth option: if you need the account for some reason (say that for some people that's the only way they can contact you), there is a service you can use to maintain your account but just delete all the posts. https://twitwipe.com/