How Gail Came to Leave X. Because Everyone Wants to Know That, Right?

We're finally putting up my BlueSky info both on my website (done) and here at the blog (not sure when that will be happening) this week, so it seems like a good time to officially tell people I left X two months ago. And, yes, I'm on BlueSky.

For A Long Time, I Didn't Have a Big Problem with X

X goes up in flames. Pixabay at Pexels

I often heard people talk of ugly stuff going on on X, some of those complaints coming from people
who had never been near it. I didn't see a lot of attacks on others in most of my time there. I had to go look for that kind of thing, it didn't usually turn up on my feed. For example, I only know who catturd is because he(?) was trending once, and, of course, I'm going to go see why someone who calls themselves catturd is trending. (Can't recall now.) But just on my feed, I didn't see a lot of unpleasantness.

That was probably because of the way I'd curated my experience there. By the time I left, I was following around 1,500 people and had about 1,200 people following me. They were primarily children's writers, other types of writers, history people, litbloggers, librarians, literary agents, book people. Most of them were there, like myself, to promote their work. Evidently, they were not the type of people who engaged in name calling on social media. What I saw from them were announcements of new publications or reviews or that an agent or a journal was opening for submissions. I saw newsy type things about problems in publishing companies and literary agencies. This, for me, was legit water cooler stuff.

Additionally, over the last year or two, no other viable alternative to X was presenting itself. I'd see people talking on Facebook about joining this platform or that platform to get away from X, but they came to nothing and soon people were moving on to something else. I just couldn't spend time going from place to place. 

So I stayed at X where I could get info and promote my short-form writing.

A Big Change Came the Morning After the Election

The morning of November 6 an enormous change came to my X feed. It was like watching an on-line street riot. People were incensed, crazed over the outcome of the election. The two standouts for me were:

1. A woman who filmed herself shouting into a camera as if she were railing at Trump supporters, telling them what was going to happen to them because they voted for Trump. She wasn't threatening them. She was yelling that they had doomed themselves. Then she posted her rant on X. No, I don't know what she thought she was going to gain with that. The Trump people had won. What could they possibly care about what a random naysayer had to naysay?
2. A guy who announced that he'd just called his Trump-loving mother and told her that when her Social Security was cut because Trump was president, he was not going to lift a finger to help her. Maybe he got a lot of support for that. I don't know. I didn't stick around to look.

Was this politics? I wondered. What is politics, anyway? I looked the word up. It's either the workings of government or other institutions or discussion of ideology related to same. I guess telling the world that you've just bitched out your mother because of whom she voted for might fall into one of those categories, but, if so, it certainly lowers the level of political discourse.

Things calmed down some after 48 hours, but the place was not the same. I was seeing less professional discussion and more the-sky-is-falling kinds of things that were not necessarily well informed or offering any thoughts on how to move forward. I wasn't the only one who saw the change. I kept seeing tweets saying things like "Where are all the writers?" "Where are the writers?" "Did everyone leave?" "Is anyone left?" 

Writers, the people I wanted to see, were abandoning the place. I held on, though, because I wanted my publishing news and, in the past at least, my work had received some attention there.

AI Raises Its Ugly Head

Towards the end of the election period, we started hearing that X was going to allow AI to train on anything posted there. That sounded a little bit like urban legend to me. I'm big on looking things up and found that, no, it was not urban legend. I do take issue with companies helping themselves to the creative output of others in order to train a computer system to pump out its own bland and pretty much unnecessary "work." I have, for instance, stopped submitting to a Medium publication that uses an AI editor. (In addition to being AI, it's a pain in the ass to work with.).

Then, while taking a writing workshop, I learned that artificial intelligence uses tremendous amounts of energy, which I had totally missed. That was the straw that broke the X camel's back for me. I am not a major environmentalist. We're talking here someone who has a three-section compost bin and a pollinator garden, not someone who lives off the grid. But I don't see how artificial intelligence is doing anything at this point to justify that kind of environmental impact.

Maybe someday AI will be responsible for doing something in the area of science that will enhance human life. But for now, it is primarily generating mind-numbing music for YouTube to broadcast with those creepy fake pictures and allowing search engines to steal info from websites in order to form shallow answers to user questions. It allows poor writers to quickly generate more poor writing and flood the Internet with it. 

In Conclusion

Between my personal X echo chamber being shattered and X becoming part of the AI invasion, I just couldn't justify staying there or, yes, spending valuable time there. Also, leaving was easier, because what appeared to be a workable alternative had finally turned up. BlueSky.

So, I'm over there now, and at some point, I hope to do a post here about my experience skeeting.