People Left Twitter Because Twitter’s Product Sucks, Not Because of Purity Politics

In the wake of the mass defection of users from Twitter to Bluesky, a lot of media commentators have adopted their favorite trope: scolding people for not having the same Very Serious opinions that they do. Michael Kruse wrote an eminently embarrassing article in Politico about being “canceled” on Bluesky late last week, and yesterday Semafor’s Ben Smith wrote about the effort on Bluesky to get transphobe and shitty writer Jesse Singal banned for terms of service violations, quoting Kruse as saying “Leaving X because you don’t like Elon is the kind of purity politics that landed Democrats in this mess to begin with.”

This is the kind of babybrained nonsense that has rendered our media class wholly unable to understand this country, assuming that the platform they’re hopelessly addicted to is America’s town square like Elon claims it to be, when every single poll ever shows that roughly one out of every five adults in America use Twitter. These manchildren whose brains never left high school debate club look at everything as a performance to prove their intelligence, and this leads them to be experts in missing the forest for the trees. Everything that happens is reverse-engineered to fit their very narrow Beltway worldview as they get mad that people won’t debate their idiotic opinions that have already been debunked several times over.

People aren’t leaving Twitter because of woke or purity politics or any other of the few self-serving themes that Beltway media commentators think about the entire world through. They’re leaving because the experience sucks. You would think that people who generally support America’s capitalist vision would understand wanting to choose a superior product, but that would wrongly assume that anything takes precedent over these nerds’ desire to rehash their high school debate club experiences as adults.

Per our Google Analytics, Bluesky has sent more traffic to Splinter in the last 28 days than Twitter. Have the Very Serious media scolds thought that there is just a simple business decision at the heart of this migration? Twitter throttles links, and their goal to keep you on their platform no matter what hurts our business. Bluesky doesn’t throttle links and thus helps our business. As Nieman Reports wrote last year, when NPR left Twitter in 2023, they didn’t see much change to their traffic.

A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped.

So why should I stay on a platform filled with abuse and random porn clips in my mentions while navigating around countless ads for crypto spam when it doesn’t help my business? Am I being too woke by not wanting to see someone’s dick while prioritizing making money for Splinter?

The notion that people left Twitter because we “don’t like Elon” is beyond absurd. Of course, hating Elon has a hand in it and no one who left would be sad to see him lose his entire fortune on this boondoggle, but the simple desire to be on a platform not teeming with abuse and spam that doesn’t try to hide your work from people is pretty straightforward. For content creators, it’s a basic question of markets and competition that in every other arena these kinds of Beltway lizard brains are happy to cheer for. That they can’t see it here is just further proof of how our media commentariat are the most out of touch people in America.