I didn’t do it completely, but I have almost entirely stopped using these services. Fighting them is a pointless endeavor, so I chose the path of least resistance.

X (Twitter)

𝕏 has been completely destroyed as a social network. This started even before it was acquired, but of course the new owner accelerated the process even more. The company was already moving in the most unpleasant direction-blocking third-party apps and pushing everything into an algorithmic feed. I somehow tolerated it and held on for several years, reading bots, bait, and an endless amount of hatred and stupidity in the algorithmic timeline.

At some point, all my notifications and messages became clogged with spam. Literally every minute I was getting an endless stream of notifications about retweets from bots. You refresh the notifications feed every few seconds, and there are always 20+ items. This happens consistently once every one or two months.

I tried to get along with the regular algorithmic feed. I honestly tried clicking “don’t show this” to tune it to my preferences, but it felt like things only got worse and worse. After updating my phone, I canceled restoring the app from backup, logged out on the web, and removed it from bookmarks so I wouldn’t open it out of habit.

I couldn’t delete this nonsense completely, because over so many years I had created accounts in many places via Twitter login. If only we had known back in 2012 what the internet would become.

Just the other day I wanted to read an article on Medium, and the account was tied to Twitter. I logged in, but the article was still blocked by a paywall. It reminded me why I hate the platform and why I deleted the app long ago, though I still had to log into X. I looked at the feed for a few minutes: bait posts, some collective chat with Grok (everyone asking it to generate images), TikToks reposted ten times over. Logged out again.

Instagram

The story with Instagram is very similar, but I’ve disliked it for even longer. I might be mistaken about the exact year, but it was definitely around 2015-2016 when it finally stopped being about photos and subscriptions.

First, all the focus shifted to Stories, and then absolutely artificially to Reels (Instagram promoted them much more aggressively at the start). With these mechanics, everything became so absurd. Most of the regular content has simply moved to Stories. It’s an app where photos and videos are published for 24 hours, and absolutely no one cares that they disappear. At best, someone adds something to highlights, which nobody looks at anyway.

There’s a kind of early-Twitter vibe to it, but a more stupid one. People usually don’t read anything and don’t write anything there; they just swipe.

The regular feed has become something extremely strange. It’s basically flooded with all kinds of recommendations and doesn’t even consistently show posts from the accounts you actually follow, especially if you don’t interact with them often. Meanwhile, it has no hesitation at all about aggressively promoting all sorts of bullshit and “experts” with their courses.

And my “content” wasn’t even seen by my own followers. I’m no longer sure they were even real people. That mattered to me, because I saw this as a source of organic traffic, but nothing worked. For a couple of years, in waves, I tried cleaning followers of bots and ended up deleting more than two thousand followers over that time. Recently, I deleted everyone entirely, along with all my subscriptions. And I have no idea what to do there next; even with an empty account, Instagram doesn’t promote content anywhere. Yeah.

Otherwise, it’s just a machine gun of endless ads. And that’s one of the reasons I didn’t delete the account entirely: there are ad dashboards there, and a lot of people still use this platform. But I think it’s time to put a stop to this. As an ordinary user, I’ve already noticed that ads are being grouped into blocks of three to five at a time, which means at auction pricing I’m losing money and people aren’t paying attention anyway.

In short, I now open Instagram rarely and don’t see much point in it.

Telegram

That cheerful animated eggplant and peaches that were removed turned out not to be the worst thing Telegram had. Quite the opposite, actually.

The slogans about speed, the best UX, and all that have disappeared somewhere. I’ve been using the app on my phone in power-saving mode for two years now, simply because by default it drains the battery if you have a couple dozen chats and subscriptions. Even with a premium subscription, content often doesn’t load, and the overall app quality has declined. But now we have auctions, very questionable advertising, and various NFTs.

Honestly, I have a feeling that Telegram has also started going in the wrong direction, and it’s doing so quite rapidly.

For now, I deleted Telegram from my computer, because it turned out to be a literal black hole for disk space. Space on my Mac kept disappearing, and when I checked system directories, I found that Telegram was taking up 30 gigabytes. Of course, this wasn’t shown in the app settings and couldn’t be cleared. How and why? No idea.

I just deleted the app from the computer. When necessary, I open the web version. It glitches a bit, but it turned out that overall it’s not that bad.

What remains

I understand that everyone uses these services differently and for different purposes. Some people simply open Instagram to watch short videos, memes, or even use it as a messenger. I find this rather amusing, because even this exact same use case can be replicated one-for-one on X, TikTok, and elsewhere.

And that makes me wonder: what could be an alternative? If a vanilla Twitter or Instagram appeared today, would anyone actually start using it? For some reason, I feel like the answer is no. At this whole media party, the requirements for content have changed: people want fast dopamine.

Unfortunately, most of the platforms I loved ten years ago no longer suit me, including their complete closure to third-party access, but that’s a separate topic I might write about someday.

What I don’t know is whether the TikTok format and feeds aimed at provoking exclusively extreme emotions are already the end point, or whether there is still room for further degradation.

I also remembered a comparison that now sounds almost like a joke: at one point, Twitter felt fundamental, one of the main startups, like the telegraph. Yes, there was a time…

But there is an app that I don’t want to delete yet. It’s good that from the old internet we still have YouTube. I criticize it only because search there has genuinely stopped working (seriously, try scrolling past 20-30 videos in the results). But at least it’s still easy to find real people there, not AI slop.