The title is a good summary of how I and (probably?) lots of other people feel about Twitter and Musk in the last month or so. This passage from Casey Newton on Platformer pushed me over the edge:
Now, awaiting Musk’s latest tweets, I find myself anxious that one of his former employees could be physically assaulted or worse over what the CEO is posting. I don’t know how, in that environment, to make little jokes about Google’s latest failed messaging app, or bad PR pitches, or any of the other bits I have been doing on Twitter forever. I don’t know how to pretend that what is happening is not actually happening. I don’t want to provide, even in the smallest of ways, a respectable backdrop against which hate speech against my fellow LGBTQ people, or Black or Jewish or any other people, can flourish.
Twitter has long existed in the fuzzy boundary between terrible and good, and that definition is largely dependent on who you were and how you used it. Being a straight white guy looking for cycling content and dumb jokes I generally had it pretty good. Even when Trump was active on there, it was still on the “good” side of that boundary for me. Platform leadership was questionable in a libertarian sense, but weren’t actively being assholes.
For me it feels different now, the passage above made me think about how gross it is. I was still engaged with the platform because I’ve been on it for so long (almost 14 years? yikes) and have had a lot of great fun on it, but nothing is forever and sometimes the places you like get gross and shitty and eventually you stop going there.