I pulled the trigger

🔗 Sunday, 11 April 2021 • Cariad Eccleston • @cariad@gamedev.lgbt

It finally happened. The abuse on Twitter went too far.

Our records indicate that you've made 8,827 abuse reports in the past 24 months. Of those, 242 reports have been processed.
"Our records indicate that you’ve made 8,827 abuse reports in the past 24 months. Of those, 242 reports have been processed."

It finally happened. The abuse on Twitter went too far.

I just don’t have enough hours in the day to block, report and recover. As much as I love my friends, I can’t wade through the slurs, threats and gore every fucking day.

I’ve burned my account.

And don’t tell me the chiefs at Twitter don’t know about their problems. They know. They don’t care.

Earlier this year, I said:

I haven’t had a “we received your report” notification from them for months now. My gut tells me it’s been close to a year.

Somehow or another, I discovered you can request copies of your private information from Twitter. It was a long shot, but I requested three pieces of personal information:

  1. When did you last send me an acknowledgment of an abuse report?
  2. How many abuse reports have you received from me in the last two years?
  3. How many of my abuse reports have been processed vs queued?

It took a few months, plus a copy of my passport, but I got the information:

Our records indicate that you've made 8,827 abuse reports in the past 24 months. Of those, 242 reports have been processed.
"Our records indicate that you’ve made 8,827 abuse reports in the past 24 months. Of those, 242 reports have been processed."

Hello,

Our records indicate that you’ve made 8,827 abuse reports in the past 24 months. Of those, 242 reports have been processed.

Thank you.

They didn’t answer my question about how long it had been since their last acknowledgment of an abuse report. They did admit, at least, that in the last two years they had processed less than 3% of my reports.

On the whole, my friends don’t care about the abuse. And honestly, I envy them. Twitter is my social circle; there’s nothing outside of it. Twitter is also my gig-hunting board; 100% of the paid work I’ve had in the last two years emerged from connections on Twitter.

Giving up on Twitter is scary. It means drifting further from my friends. It probably means killing my freelance career. But staying, with the certainty of that daily abuse poisoning me, is untenable.

I’m a smidge depressed about the whole thing, but I’m trying to acknowledge the feeling without letting it engulf me. This is the Season of Mindfulness after all.

With all of this new-found time, I had a great morning yesterday working on my DevOps book. I feel like I’m really starting to find the right theme to pull all my notes together.

I’ve also created a blog at dev.to where I’m hoping I can find some kind of coding community to replace Twitter. I shared some code I hacked up a couple of weeks ago to draw blocks on the command-line with Python, and a bit of engagement would really cheer me up.

In closing: fuck Twitter.