Rec | LEAVING X DOT COM

Rec

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(Yes, it's finally time. After 10+ years of on-and-off use, I finally left for good a few weeks ago and am here to evangelize. We need you thinking healthily. Besides, this website exists now!) ...
I get it, it used to be fun. I was there for over ten years until recently. We used to get a dish of the hottest Conversation from the most in-the-know and influential writers, thinkers, and critics. But I’m telling you that El•n has won – X.com is markedly different from Twitter; that place is gone forever and this new Thing is changing you along with it and you need to GTFO of there right now.
The default tone of “discourse” on X.com has necrotized into a haughty, patronizing, and unbearable mode of unilateral Quote Tweets delivered via the For You feed – they really should just call it your trough. You inject this slop straight into your bloodstream (because it's what you've always done); it then metastasizes and destroys your very concept of what it means to engage critically with the world.
You think you know more because you're seeing more words about more things from more people that write more words about more things but really you're just getting angrier, you're just getting more used to pithy dunks and reductionism, you're just scrolling more, you're getting pumped up full of hot air and floating away from anything of real-world consequence ... rhetoric may be dead but your critical heart doesn't have to die with it.
Please leave the site. It’s no longer worth your time and you will be shocked how much more clearly you will think about the same things. After all, you care about them, don’t you? It’s not like you’ll stop thinking about them.

@_loegan

Jan 28, 2024

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@lewis_cross

yessss i mean it was always so toxic but recently it's been getting so much worse and so many bots i just cant handle the mess anymore, guess i should hop on the GTFO train

Jan 29, 2024

@crunnels

I’m on day 20 of no X/Twitter and it feels so good :’)

Jan 29, 2024

@_loegan

it was interesting to put all the journalists, commentators, and critics into the same smoky barroom salon for a whole decade. but ultimately these people should talk to each other, and to their audiences, through their work

Jan 29, 2024

@ellego0ds

left a couple years ago and never looked back. it’s so bad for my spirit :(

Jan 29, 2024

@_loegan

matmcdonut – be the change! move to Groupchats and your work and more specialized, insular spaces... people should talk to each other in their communities; communities should talk to each other in their work

Jan 29, 2024

@_loegan

emermaid – "not worth it anymore" is exactly the place I landed. The toxic parts were always inherent in the platform but were, for some, outweighed by whatever merits it may have had (as an experiment, I'd say it was interesting but it failed?). Once Elon came along and purposefully broke the functionality of the website, all that remained were the drawbacks and I truly fear he's taking some of our best minds down with it

Jan 29, 2024

@itap

thank you for the reminder :) deleting the app rn

Jan 29, 2024

@messiluvr2000

i just deleted the app from my phone today. i noticed myself spending too much time thinking about drama that was going on on the site and it was affecting my mental health!

Jan 29, 2024

@shegoestoanotherschool

i really think if he absolutely had to rename it he should've named it elon's website. and it could just say that at the top in comic sans. that would've actually been kinda funny but he's too much of a self serious bozo for that atp

Jan 29, 2024

@matmcdonut

If it wasn’t due to the fact it was so integral to my business network I would have left months ago :(

Jan 29, 2024

@samhain

way to escape chief

Jan 28, 2024

@serena

We are finally free 🥲

Jan 28, 2024

@julie

yes I deleted as soon as that sale went through and it is liberating

Jan 28, 2024

@lizer

Hey Logan :)

Jan 28, 2024

@emermaid

I left a few months ago and I’m honestly so glad I did, it‘s just not worth it anymore. amazing to realise how less angrier i get about shit online, also realising how that i’m not supposed to know so much about other people either. V freeing imo

Jan 28, 2024

@_loegan

Can't wait for the replies on this one! Ancillary reading: https://dirt.fyi/article/2023/10/what-was-replying

Jan 28, 2024

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the life and death of online platforms

piece that explores our collective relationship with algorithmically driven platforms and theorizing why non-algorithmically driven platforms haven't caught on yet (PI.FYI mentioned ‼️). some of the references and moments in the writing style makes this article feel hollow and generic, but the overall conceit is engaging. also this article (and the general public alike) keep saying tumblr is dead but tumblr is very alive for me personally.
"Just kidding. There is no pure place: we crave the end because it seems cleaner on the other side. We all live,and have always lived, in the muck—even and especially after death. Download the niche app, participate in the empty-ish forum. Labor to make the experience you want. Labor to animate a human internet."

@veggiedumpling

Mar 6, 2024

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BEING WHIMSICAL IN EARNEST TO STAY LOOSE WITH IT

I have some subscriptions expiring soon that I can’t financially justify anymore so I’m on that article grind and for I suppose sadomasochistic reason many of these articles have been about ai and I simply can’t get behind these overeducated assholes proposing it has any humane, beneficial qualities at all. (It is quite literally inhuman.) the main argument always seems to be efficiency or offloading the emotional labor of navigating your own life and an argument that essentially boils down to ‘fuck the elderly and disabled leave them alone isolated in their homes or institutions with their screens and an algorithm fed on bigoted rhetoric that hates them’. You have to keep the whimsy to remember the time ai saves you is worth nothing if it keeps you from your friends and family and passions and general élan vital. (Also that nothing is worth the environmental racism, air pollution, and quickening towards the water wars necessitated by data processing centers.) in the scope of universal relativity, the laws of physics, space and time, string theory probably, it is a miracle that any of our consciousnesses have been realized as a tangible collection of cells cloaked in flesh moving around on the single life sustaining planet we know of among one another, each individual their own fantastical miracle at the crosshairs of time and space. That you are ever anywhere with another person has cosmic implications. Whimsy and recognizing the secular miracle of existing is what makes it all mean anything. They want us to forget our miracle of being and sign our time and eyesight over to the ai that further resigns you to the hustle culture normalizing three jobs to afford food and shelter. Mortality makes your life mean something but death in itself is meaningless. It is cruel and random. It’s the life that matters, not the moment it ceases.Take that hammer for your brothers and sisters, remember however gooey you feel inside is the same solubility everyone always feels shifting inside, and it is that persistent threat of dissolution and navigating the slick tumbleweed in each of us that makes us human, that keeps the poets employed. The confusion of being alive is paramount to the human condition, and the clinical precision of ai obfuscates the beauty of being alive with other people. If you prick us we bleed! Heaven is each other, etc. Reject binary codes and techno-fascist yes-men. I’ll show you my ooz and you might see yourself in the leaking I can’t contain. Maybe we can ooze together in a Francis Bacon, Queer (2024) sort of way.

@broodyscanner7

Jul 22, 2025

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THE CULTURE WAR, ALGORITHM FODDER, GENERALIZATIONS

everything is politics. from vaccines to lgbt matters, politicians have leveraged the things conservative americans don’t understand to stoke fear and confusion.
this isn’t anything new. what is new is the algorithms that reenforce those fears. comment sections we’re told to treat like real conversation just flooded with faceless accounts saying their most vile inside thoughts. it’s easy to want to interact and easier to just read it all and be mad. but every second spent engaging is another brain scrambling distraction.
these sensationalized posts and comments do nothing for education, understanding, or empathy. even on the left, slacktivism actively hurts the cause. theres an idea that someone who holds ignorant beliefs is *bad* in all politicized fields. but let’s be real, just because uncle jeff is pissed about tuck underwear it doesn’t mean he’s a climate change denier. generalizing people is exactly what politicians want from us.
social issues are important and politics aren’t going away from that any time soon. but social media is a slippery slope and i personally refuse to engage. when it bleeds into my real life (”parents just WANT their kids to be trans”) i try to engage in conversations that get to the root of the issue. where’s this info coming from, why do you believe that? these are the kind of questions strangers won’t ask them on the internet.
misinformation is a sickness that we’re all plagued with. to find some truth and understanding we cannot be having these discussions on platforms like facebook or instagram or twitter. if we do, we’re just giving these tech ceos and politicians what they need: engagement and fear

@roogby

Jun 3, 2025

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"that's us / wild combination" – arthur russell

about a year ago a friend of mine was going around asking people what they felt to be the "most romantic" song, and this was my gut response. There's just something so sweet about the scene at play here... nothing dramatic is happening, it's just a moment of stillness (thru movement?) in a relationship – maybe it's even just a friendship – that defines the baseline of what romance at its best should feel like. I find Arthur's good at that

@_loegan

Jan 5, 2024

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8 hours of vintage department store christmas music tapes

"Ambient music should accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting." – Brian Eno
Christmas falls on a Monday this year, which means many of us have had to put in a full work week. At approximately 5pm today, we'll suddenly need to turn on our holiday brain – RELAX! we'll scream at ourselves. What better to induce a Xanax-like state of absent-minded – yet still holiday-related – bliss than corporate muzak? Whatever holiday-related ambience you're trying to cultivate or salvage, this may just be the absolutely perfect soundtrack ~
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQKlEkKXBzQ

@_loegan

Dec 22, 2023

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ELI enis' exploration of the gen z-driven shoegaze boom

"So how did we get here? How did shoegaze, a genre short on hooks, memorable riffs, and magnetic personalities, that’s carried on as a niche strain of indie music since the initial wave of ‘gazers receded from the limelight in the mid-’90s, suddenly become a defining sound for Gen-Z rock fans?"
Important and fascinating cover of a very real phenomenon. Part of what I found most fascinating is the compositional aspects of this new wave, which sees The Kids employing recording techniques more typically associated with pop songwriting – toplining to a "band" track created by a separate producer.
https://www.stereogum.com/2245469/tiktok-has-made-shoegaze-bigger-than-ever/columns/sounding-board

@_loegan

Dec 19, 2023