I'm joining the campaign to deactivate my Twitter account on August 17

I haven’t talked to the other Boing Boing people about my decision to participate in #deactiday. This is something I want to do with @frauenfelder. Taking the share buttons off Boing Boing would be forcing a decision on you about whether or not you want to use Twitter and Facebook.

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Whether or not to use?
Maybe I am misunderstanding, so would you like to elaborate?

As far as I see it, everyone can still use FB and Twitter if BB would get rid of the share and tweet one-click links below all posts. It’s slightly less convenient. Even closing BB’s presences on those companies services wouldn’t force anyone besides yourselves not to use those.

I will kill my twitter - I effective didn’t use it since Nov. 9 2016, and am currently just squatting the handle. I am, however, also thinking about quitting the BBS as well. Leaving twitter was good, but I miss it sometimes for it’s speed and some clever tweeps, especially in the biology twitter bubble. I’d surely miss some personas of the BBS as well.

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Twitter has different roots than you might suspect; it evolved out of TXTMob, which was used by activists for communicating and coordinating during protests and actions. It was later used to plan mass lootings, something I think would still work (with appropriate anonymity tools), and I’d like to see more often. Then the idea was recuperated in the form of the spectacularized flash mob, and after that monetized with Twitter.

If you want to use the buttons, they are there.

That was the easiest activism ever. I literally didn’t have to do a thing. And hey, I’m 4 days early even!

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I’d compare them to the study carrels at one of the libraries when I was in college. I remember being so dumbfounded by what a fellow human being had written about other human beings* that I got to a point where I had very little faith in humanity and became quite nihilistic, sending me into this phase for a while. In hindsight I might’ve reasoned that it was from one random asshole, and dozens of other people had sat there without offending anyone. But, there I went…

I didn’t (usually) see this kind of invective from my friends on Facebook, so much as it would crop up from friends of friends, on my friends’ timelines. News article comments (Washington Post, Yahoo! News etc.), though, are quite simply pits of simmering diarrhea.

*It’s not like I’d just fallen off the potato wagon turnip truck, I guess it was the last straw or something. To this day I don’t remember exactly what I read but it was something about our female opponents in the First Gulf War.

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Oh shit
I just rejoined social media after years of fighting it.

Yes it’s a trap

But if you retain your love you can augment the false reality being foist upon us

Or I move to a cabin in the woods
But I would need wifi to order goods

Hello. My name is Arduenn.

I have been Twitter-free for almost 3 years now. I haven’t been tempted to go back since I deleted my account and I would like to share with you that it can be done and that it’s actually not as hard as quitting taking heroin intravenously.

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… stuck in a disused lavatory in the basement with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’ ?

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Specifically to your question, and less general: I use ‘community’ in a loose general sense rather than a technical one, of friends I’ve made on the service, and friends-of-friends, not confined to a particular instance

Just because were in digital formation doesn’t mean Heart can seep through
Take it to the bank
.

How is that “forcing a decision” on me?

NOT before we’ve had a couple of drinks.

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the 25 rule on facebook is fascinating.

So people have to beg people they know to contact them to see their posts!!!

Otherwise you are in a repeating merrygoround

It’s exactly the other way around actually.

If you currently want to visit Boing Boing without being tracked by Facebook, twitter, Google and many others, you will have to install a ad-blocker. The default is that you will be tracked, you will unwillingly participate in their platforms.

Right now you are forcing the decision of your visitors, you are selling your visitors to a long list of unsavory companies. I understand, I know you have to make money, and I can block the things I don’t like. But you (and especially @doctorow) are not walking the walk when it comes to the website.

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I want to add another hearty recommendation for Mastodon. I still have my social media accounts (Twitter/Facebook) but I only use them occasionally for very specific purposes. (Twitter for shouting at politicians or companies, Facebook for reaching out to people I know but am no longer in contact with)

Mastodon fills the hole left by both nicely. It takes a while to build up a follow list that will get you some fun content, it’s a bit more work then on a platform that mines your behavior and predicts what you like and spoon feeds it to you. So this effort you have to put in to Mastodon is for a good cause.

It can also be a bit more boring, I will stop engaging with it sooner then with Facebook or Twitter. But when you think about it, that is also another good sign, it is less addictive, it is less optimized to game your reward center.

There are big communities of normally marginalized people, but that doesn’t mean there is no place for you there if you are (like me) a cis-gender white man. You may just for once not be in the majority and that only means you will get to train your empathy muscles a bit more and in exchange get to see a more diverse community in action!

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I switched off British TV, radio, and newpapers instead. I use Twitter to communicate with other people who’d like to replace our extreme right wing, anti-social government with a socialist democracy. What can I say? I have the politics and social values of the 1970s era Canadian society that raised me.

Also, I’d feel bad about abandoning the Palestinians. I see text, images and video from local activists of many of the kids shot, and other scenes (dawn, breakfast, beach, kids, football, life) that prevent me normalising the violence. I read a thread in real time by a woman who’s dad was being violently arrested in Egypt during the Arab Spring. I am witness to too many AfroAmerican kids in USA being blown away by bad cops. And the First Nation’s water protectors: discussions, art, posters, photos, text. It’s better than TV and there’s no authority verifying interpretations. I have to do my own research to check up on the news media anyway, so why have a corporate middleman at all? (I do see lots of video news, and read both news and blog articles. It’s just not the main event)

But otherwise, I’d deactivate.
#WeAreCorbyn

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If you wanted to pull my triggers, you succeed.

[rant]

Disclaimer: I worked in West Africa for two years, and serveral other countries where clean water isn’t a commodity, but the difference between life and death. I saw kids in intensive care due to dysenteria. I didn’t see them die, but mostly because I didn’t belong. I caught typhoid fever myself, despite being a privileged white etranger with access to filters, steriliser and whatnot. Of course, I did get proper medical care.

Comparing access to clean water vs. shitting yourself to death with a one-click track-all social media solution vs copying a URL to another window/application is outrageous. Funny? Mind? Works?
What the actual fecal matter! Get off of my lawn, or I’ll truly have to delete my account and sulk about the inhumanity of online comments.

[/rant]

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I got online in 1999, developed an Internet addiction in Yahoo chatrooms that climaxed (ugghhh) with Myspace.

WHO CARES.

Pretty much BB is only place i post. I cant wait for the rest of the world to get over that bullshit. Will they?

I also liked that article. Not by clicking a thumb-up icon, just by noting that it furthered the conversation and incrementing my respect for Kara Swisher’s opinion. (Shame the NYT only cares about the thumbs, and not the genuine human opinion, for all practical purposes).

Twitter has repeatedly said it won’t regulate its content, and has made sure it doesn’t even really have a lever to do that. It probably can’t function, financially, as anything other than a passive sluice for whatever people want to flush through it. Asking it to change its editorial policy is like dining from a sewage outlet, then giving the water company snippy feedback on its cuisine.

It has some rules, just as the water company has rules against industrial waste in its sewage, but even if those are enforced, that’s not the same thing as taking responsibility for the overall result. Most of the discussion has ignored that distinction, and it’s become a red herring. People like Alex Jones can game any given set of rules (and they would if they had to). They cannot game a human editor who says “you’re being an asshole and we won’t help you”.

Internet commentators like to pretend this is an unheard-of insult to free speech (almost as if they had a vested interest). That’s bullshit. Does Fox News let Hillary Clinton say whatever she wants as long as she follows their rules, and if not, is that censorship, and if so, does it hurt their numbers?

Twitter was a valuable experiment. It showed promise in some areas (e.g. having more reporters on the ground), and severe drawbacks in others. But it’s run its course, and now it is time for a new experiment.

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“Twitter is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but let’s not be too hasty in our exit.”

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