I quit Twitter
I've noticed that in general it's impossible to have good discussion on Twitter. I'm certainly not the first person to have noticed this either. There's a few pockets on there that really try to have some quality in communications but unfortunately they are operating in an environment that's highly hostile. I have enjoyed some of the things I've learned from those brave souls who are attempting the Sisyphean challenge of posting detailed thoughts on a platform that's directly designed to opposed such a mode of communication.
Much like Neil Postman said, the medium is the message.
Twitter's small maximum limit on characters per post is absolutely toxic. It reduces the ability for quality communications enormously and incentives shallow reactionary comments. The short character limit makes the expression of new ideas hard and expressing detailed ideas is basically impossible. People who wish to use the platform must therefore degrade the quality of their thinking in order to participate. Nothing good comes of this longer term, especially people who don't realize this painful tradeoff that they are buying into by participating.
The other thing is that there's an enormous number of scams running on Twitter right now. A huge number of accounts aren't real and eventually I just got sick of seeing the same old scams all the time all over the place. The annoying thing for me is that it seems that when Twitter really wants to censor something they are quite effective. But why can't they apply some effort to clean up the blatant phishing and frauds while they are at it? If anyone is claiming to be me on Twitter they will be fraudulent, much like the numerous other fake accounts on there. If for some reason I have to return to the platform I'll make a blog post here about it.
Not being on Twitter is great for my mental health and I'm not really losing out on much from not being on there. In any case I was just sick of the endless toxicity on that platform so I deleted my account. I'd encourage you to do the same if you are on there, you will feel better for it.