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It’s been an awful year on social media. Filtering didn’t help. I left Twitter a week ago and haven’t looked back.
這是在社交媒体上过得很糟糕的一年。过滤也没用。一周前我放弃了推特，再也没有回头。
Can’t decide yet who won—the trolls or me. It’s still too soon to tell. All I know is that it’s been a week so far since I bailed on Twitter and I feel fine.
I love social media. I hate social media. You too？ Over the years， I’ve been perpetually readjusting my relationship with it， working hard to avoid the creep of saturation2. I’m not on Snapchat or LinkedIn either.3 You couldn’t drag me into a comments section.
And then there’s Twitter.
When you work at home， Twitter makes for an excellent water cooler4. I have for years skated by on the illusion that the bright， witty， passionately engaged people I follow there are somehow my colleagues， the friends I can make daily conversation with about politics and television and health.
I have even been lucky enough to make a few offline friends and work contacts through it， one of whom I’m going out for beers with tonight， in fact. If you come to Twitter because you like smart people who can also make you laugh， you will not be disappointed. And it’s free！ The only cost is a steady stream of crap from the worst dregs5 of humanity.
I got on Twitter in the spring of 2008. I don’t recall how soon afterward I was first called an ugly bitch， but to my recollection it took a while. Sure， every now and then there’d be an unpleasant mention in my feed or aggressively unsolicited feedback from an opinionated egg avatar.6 But I never seriously reconsidered my presence until a few years later， when I wrote a magazine story that negatively referenced a well-known media misogynist7.
Within moments I was getting death threats—as in， I’ll come to your house and murder you. I had been in the thick of a crowd at a concert at the time the responses started pouring in， and I remember being overwhelmed with a feeling of paranoid8 dread. Suddenly， it felt as if anyone in that throng could be someone who actively wanted to hurt me. And not just me， I hasten to mention. When you look through a troll’s timeline， you rarely see a single focused target. Nope， trolls often spew in all directions like lawns sprinkler of vomit. Usually cloaked in their anonymity （although sometimes emboldened to keep it real），9 Twitter’s dedicated trolls yell at strangers all day like it’s their job. Even when I got into a perfectly civilized disagreement with a male public figure， a swarm of his supporters swiftly smelled a fight and descended to tell me to die. Over the years I’ve been monitoring Twitter’s troll problem， because Twitter’s troll problem hasn’t improved. I’ve watched other people—most frequently female—face harrowing10 threats to their safety. I’ve followed the crap that Feminist Frequency’s Anita Sarkeesian has endured for openly talking about sexism in the gaming world. I watched when tech editor Holly Brockwell had to temporarily disable her account “due to the number of creepy， abusive threats she got， mainly from men” after she wrote a story about not wanting to have children.
I’ve also allowed my hopes to rise when it seemed like Twitter might be taking serious strides toward rectifying its abuse issues and removing the worst offenders，11 and when public officials have recognized that threatening someone online is still known， in legal circles as， threatening someone.
But this has been a year to drain12 a person’s optimism. Lately actress Leslie Jones went through such an outrageously ugly torrent of disgusting racist abuse that she briefly left Twitter—right at the height of an otherwise peak moment in her career. At least she got to turn her whole fiasco—which included a hacking of her site—into an Emmy joke， telling the representatives from Ernst
這是在社交媒体上过得很糟糕的一年。过滤也没用。一周前我放弃了推特，再也没有回头。
Can’t decide yet who won—the trolls or me. It’s still too soon to tell. All I know is that it’s been a week so far since I bailed on Twitter and I feel fine.
I love social media. I hate social media. You too？ Over the years， I’ve been perpetually readjusting my relationship with it， working hard to avoid the creep of saturation2. I’m not on Snapchat or LinkedIn either.3 You couldn’t drag me into a comments section.
And then there’s Twitter.
When you work at home， Twitter makes for an excellent water cooler4. I have for years skated by on the illusion that the bright， witty， passionately engaged people I follow there are somehow my colleagues， the friends I can make daily conversation with about politics and television and health.
I have even been lucky enough to make a few offline friends and work contacts through it， one of whom I’m going out for beers with tonight， in fact. If you come to Twitter because you like smart people who can also make you laugh， you will not be disappointed. And it’s free！ The only cost is a steady stream of crap from the worst dregs5 of humanity.
I got on Twitter in the spring of 2008. I don’t recall how soon afterward I was first called an ugly bitch， but to my recollection it took a while. Sure， every now and then there’d be an unpleasant mention in my feed or aggressively unsolicited feedback from an opinionated egg avatar.6 But I never seriously reconsidered my presence until a few years later， when I wrote a magazine story that negatively referenced a well-known media misogynist7.
Within moments I was getting death threats—as in， I’ll come to your house and murder you. I had been in the thick of a crowd at a concert at the time the responses started pouring in， and I remember being overwhelmed with a feeling of paranoid8 dread. Suddenly， it felt as if anyone in that throng could be someone who actively wanted to hurt me. And not just me， I hasten to mention. When you look through a troll’s timeline， you rarely see a single focused target. Nope， trolls often spew in all directions like lawns sprinkler of vomit. Usually cloaked in their anonymity （although sometimes emboldened to keep it real），9 Twitter’s dedicated trolls yell at strangers all day like it’s their job. Even when I got into a perfectly civilized disagreement with a male public figure， a swarm of his supporters swiftly smelled a fight and descended to tell me to die. Over the years I’ve been monitoring Twitter’s troll problem， because Twitter’s troll problem hasn’t improved. I’ve watched other people—most frequently female—face harrowing10 threats to their safety. I’ve followed the crap that Feminist Frequency’s Anita Sarkeesian has endured for openly talking about sexism in the gaming world. I watched when tech editor Holly Brockwell had to temporarily disable her account “due to the number of creepy， abusive threats she got， mainly from men” after she wrote a story about not wanting to have children.
I’ve also allowed my hopes to rise when it seemed like Twitter might be taking serious strides toward rectifying its abuse issues and removing the worst offenders，11 and when public officials have recognized that threatening someone online is still known， in legal circles as， threatening someone.
But this has been a year to drain12 a person’s optimism. Lately actress Leslie Jones went through such an outrageously ugly torrent of disgusting racist abuse that she briefly left Twitter—right at the height of an otherwise peak moment in her career. At least she got to turn her whole fiasco—which included a hacking of her site—into an Emmy joke， telling the representatives from Ernst