BarcelonaBack when X was still called Twitter and tweets could be no more than 140 characters, every now and then a popular figure would loudly announce that he was leaving the platform, explaining that he had had enough of the alleged harassment he suffered from others users, in the form of insults or comments that I did not want to read. I often ended up returning to it discreetly, because I missed the rest, but the public positioning was already done.
Since billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter – exactly two years ago today – and changed its name, this tendency to run away from it and explain it has intensified. It is becoming more and more common for politicians or artists to announce that they are leaving X because they are no longer comfortable with it. A recent example: Jaume Collboni, the mayor of Barcelona, following the example of his predecessor in office, Ada Colau.
In reality, while understandable, this kind of reaction is over the top and completely unnecessary. In the age of Musk, the content we see on X may seem more aggressive and radical than before. But the network also has many configuration options that make the user experience quite smooth. Next, we review the main ones.
What X is (and what it isn’t)
The main mistake many X defectors make is over-expectation. The platform was and continues to be a kind of digital public square where much of the political, social, economic and informational activity of the Western world takes place. But it is not – and never has been – a good place for dialogue: all of us who post there have despaired at some point when, in reply number 27 to one of our tweets, someone too lazy to read the previous messages in the timeline returns us to question about some aspect that we had already clarified in answer number two. This fragmentation nullifies any desire to hold coherent conversations.
X, like Twitter before, basically serves to get your content – information, opinion, intoxication – to the audience that might be interested in it. This results in two very clear user profiles: the very few who post there and the vast majority who come in to read and, at best, interact with it in some way. For the first group, the current X is less comfortable than the Twitter of the past, because if you want to get exposure among users who don’t know you yet, you have no choice but to transform your tweet into an advertisement – paying the advertising fee current – or subscribe to one of the payment methods that claim to increase the visibility of your content: it’s business, friends.
The three keys of a less tense X
On the other hand, the second group has three tools to have an X with less hate, intolerance and lies, and the best thing is that all three are free: choose well who you follow, avoid the algorithm and configure your profile very restrictive
The first key is the rational use of X’s most basic function: the decision about which users to follow. At the beginning it’s easy to get carried away by the enthusiasm and follow people indiscriminately, but it’s a good idea to clean up our list of followed users, delete those who are not active, those who have become radicalized or those who no longer post interesting things Not only will we have a cleaner timeline, but we’ll also avoid telling X about interests we no longer have. Of course, you don’t have to follow only users with whom you are related: it is healthy to know other opinions.
The second key is a derivative of the first, but unlike the first, it may not be as obvious, as evidenced by the fact that less than 5% of X users use it. It’s about bypassing the algorithm that determines which tweets we see in our timeline. Due to commercial interests, this algorithm gives more weight to the most controversial content in order to favor the user’s time spent on the platform and thus expose him to more advertisements. If you accept this algorithmic timeline, which is what X enables by default, among the tweets you follow you will also see tweets from users you don’t follow, and that X shows you to provoke some reaction, the angrier the better.
Fortunately, you have the antidote at your fingertips: at the very top of your timeline are two tabs: For youwhich is the algorithmic choice preferred by X, i followedwhich only shows you tweets posted by users you’ve chosen to follow. Choosing this second tab is the easiest way to pacify your experience in X. Generally, the platform remembers which of the two tabs you chose, but in some cases it insists on returning you to the algorithmic timeline; I recommend experimenting with switching between the native apps and the web app, and even clearing your browser cookies. Keep in mind that avoiding the algorithmic timeline won’t save you ads—you’ll need to subscribe to the most expensive of the three premium modes to avoid seeing ads.
By the way, the same option to avoid the algorithm also exists – conveniently hidden so that it is difficult to find – in other manipulative social networks, such as Instagram.
Finally, the third key to enjoying a healthier X is to assume that other people can tell us what they want – I find it very dangerous to leave content censorship in the hands of the platforms – but, as in life, we we have no obligation to listen to it, let alone respond to it. In practice, this results in mindlessly blocking users who we find annoying, or even better, muting them, which makes them even angrier because they are unaware that we no longer read them. It’s worth noting that X has just modified the way user blocking works, who can now continue to read us but not interact. In practice, the effect is unchanged: less noise in our timeline.
Even more useful is to silence most of the warnings that someone has challenged us. A Settings > Notifications > Filters > Mute Notifications I have them all disabled except for the users I follow. Instead, I don’t want X to alert me about anything someone says to me who hasn’t even bothered to follow me. Dodgy profiles, such as those often used by harassment campaigns, can also be muted here.
Defections impoverish the platform
With these simple actions to tidy up our timeline, X is back to being a perfectly functional social network. Naturally, there will always be those who justify leaving for the ownership of Elon Musk, an individual as technically brilliant – he has revolutionized the automotive, aerospace and telecommunications industries – as socially suspect. It is true that controlling the algorithm can manipulate public opinion, or more precisely that of the public that allows itself to be manipulated. But it is also not that all the owners of other social networks or conventional media are not sisters of charity interested in the welfare of society.
X’s real problem is that defections – for the wrong reasons, I insist – are impoverishing it. When a public figure, a media outlet or an institution stops publishing on X, it becomes less useful to me and my informational work has become more complicated, because there are sources that I now have to look for elsewhere, such as Mastodon, e-mail newsletters or the RSS feeds of their media or blogs.
