The mainstream western platforms have so much brain poison. Which I say with some reservation because Twitter did help me reach ML at some point in time, so not like it’s all bad, but that was also pre-Musk-takeover. After him, it seemed to slowly deteriorate into little more than bots and neo-nazis with leftish twitter more marginalized.

And I mean, even back then, it had plenty of brain poison and false paths to get lost going down. I do not miss the cortisol spikes (not sure if I’m being figurative or literal) from reading the latest Twitter beef and being very careful not to get involved, so as not to suddenly have ire turned on me over a phrasing misunderstanding in my notifications. I never liked how it had this embedded status-based dynamic, where small accounts basically had to ingratiate themselves to the ones with lots of followers, or else risk getting quote tweeted and bombarded because they said something that set the person off. I found that a lot of mid-sized accounts (decent number of followers, but not like in the tens of thousands or something) would have a tendency to act like you were in their house invading their personal space when replying to them, instead of it being a public forum, which only made the angst worse over minor misunderstandings and confrontations. And to some extent, I couldn’t blame them for acting that way about it because it wasn’t like they were necessarily wanting to be a minor e-celeb. They may have more so stumbled it because they were witty, or because they happened to exist as a girl on the internet with a conventionally attractive pfp pic and so were getting guys chasing them, or sometimes a combination of the two.

In retrospect though, it’s not at all surprising that a society like the west’s would produce such an unhealthy and stratified-feeling “social media” platform like Twitter.