Annie D

there is some rhetorical arms race specific to Twitter where people (at least People Whomst Mostly Reply, which is almost a different species of twitterer than People Who Mostly Tweet Into The Void And Respond To Their Own Mentions) take the most aggressive positions possible, which makes the rest of us defensive, which makes our reply guys even more aggressive, etc. how much of this is baked deliberately into the site design (opaque algorithm-based promotion, the "like" button functioning as "retweet but randomized" for people who don't have their timelines in a chokehold, the tendency of the first tweet in a thread to get 10-30x the attention of any follow-up thought) and how much is the site culture we created ("ratioing", sealioning, QT dunks, meme templates, gimmick accounts, content aggregation) is hard to determine.

edit: oh also the thing where the moderation tools have always been bad. like the specific experience of scrolling down a long queue of transphobic hate speech to get to the "show more replies, including those that may contain offensive content" fold that hides all the "congratulations! fuck the terfs in this thread, you're beautiful" comments, that's been going on ever since they decided sorting replies in chronological order was just too Old Web.

twitter kind of distilled all the toxic, reactionary bullshit i hated about tumblr's culture into something far more unpleasant and nasty, and the unwanted potential for a post to go viral and attract flies made me feel like a level 1 mmo character in an open pvp world waiting to get ganked and stomped on by a raid group of max level kitted out characters lmao

i genuinely believe that the website is engineered to make you as outraged as possible and hooked into arguing and dunking on others online, because This Pleases The Algorithm and drives up Engagement™ that Advertisers Crave which just results in an endless cycle of angry, paranoid people taking shots at and eating each other because there is absolutely no room for nuance in 128 character posts and plenty of room for someone to insert their own (extremely, cartoonishly negative) interpretation

and then elmo took over and declared open season on trans people and rolled out the red carpet for all the previously banned nazi shitheads to come on back and at that point i was like nope, fuck this festering anus of a website, i'm outta here because i absolutely hated the place even before then and was only there because i wanted to keep up with friends; but truthfully i just wanted an excuse to leave for good lmao 🙃

The inhumane monkey cage metaphor is a little too accurate given the ceo's other company (neuralink) which is funny but also those poor monkies :(