My time wasn't nearly as bad but I definitely feel a lot of this. I ended up stuck in these awful mood cycles because of my adhd or autism or whatever the hell is going on in my brain making me want to check the feed all the time, and there were a lot of dark periods I was not equipped to deal with emotionally.
I stayed for connections, but as time went on, I realized all I was doing was retweeting because everything else just made me angry on some level, my brain stuffed with old grudges and endless frustration with endlessly repetitive and mind rotting discourse I had no power to stop, no matter how much I modded my twitter clients. There were periods twitter was such a bad influence on me, that all the horrible people I had been exposed to on it, made me lash out in the dumbest ways in completely different spaces.
I think what finally broke me in December was seeing those same self-destructive and outwardly destructive behaviors showing up in people I knew for years, alongside the mass nazi unbanning, and it finally clicked for me that there was no making this work anymore. This was bad for me, and definitely for many others. I think the only people who were using that cesspit correctly were just people trying to get visibility in niche industry fields or netting art commissions. You could do that somewhat casually. The rest of us...
I remember at least two dog piles I had to deal with, probably more in there. One was baffling, where ParkSydePhill fans were accusing me of being an imposter in the most confusing way possible (I was tweeting about a game he was apparently playing at the time), or the more serious one where I parroted an old Errant Signal Half Life 2 take in an admittedly dumb way and had to deal with a week of The Gamers clogging my mentions with the r-slur. It was infuriating how I got basically no emotional support from my friends there because they had been conditioned to have no sympathy for someone who makes a questionable take, even as I explained the awful shit being piled in my mentions.
It has actually become difficult for me to think of any positive influence twitter had on my life now. I mean there is sum, but all I can remember is how awful it was, how bitter it made me. I don't want there to be a twitter replacement because that is one of the most cruel things I can imagine wishing on the world.
I also bounced off the obnoxious smugness of mastadon. I've probably had a smug moment here or there sadly, but at least I was doing it on the grounds of understanding how the very structure of twitter is built to create bad behaviors in us, and trying to explain that. The judgmental stuff going on over there is just too much, when there are obviously entirely new problems over there.
I'd say social media was a mistake but I also know from years of experience that forums were also kind of extremely fucking horrible for different reasons. The one upside is that communities had more control over who can be in them with forums.
Just kind of brain-vomiting, and sorry for attaching myself to this post, but I just had to vent. I think a lot of us are going to have to unpack some actual trauma that site inflicted on us, and also question why it took us so long to finally escape.
tl;dr: same
