EMEMBER the minimalism of early/earlier Twitter? Here it is in 2009; Notice how in 2014 it’s already bloated; nowadays it takes up gigabytes of RAM — all this to read SMS-sized blurbs and replies to them. I have to restart my browser just to read notifications. I’ve had enough!

Twitter, the Saudi-owned (partly at least) social control media company (i.e. censorship, a filter of communications whose owners determine what people or speech are permissible), is finished. It’s dying anyway.

Weeks ago it banned, with neither warning nor notice (let alone an explanation), the account that supports Julian Assange. It was terminated despite being professional and polite. It was associated with some very high-profile people, including Julian Assange’s family. Weeks later the account was reinstated (after huge backlash), but other accounts associated with this one remain banned. Everything they’ve ever published got deleted for — possibly at least — being ‘inconvenient’ to the site’s owners, i.e. shareholders who subsidise this company’s losses.

In order to reduce these losses or turn up some temporary profits (for the first time ever!) a year ago Twitter cut off third-party applications. It killed APIs in an effort to impose its surveillance malware (‘app’) on all users and each page was greeted with a pop-up pushing this malicious ‘app’.

Moments ago the site started imposing its utterly disgusting mobile UI on all visitors, even those who do not use a mobile device. This, to me, was the final straw.

I will still have stuff copied onto Twitter (through Diaspora), I will occasionally check replies (perhaps once a day), but for all practical purposes my presence in Twitter will remain mostly a phantom. Later this week I will have posted my 666,666^th tweet (special number), but before I get to it I sort of ‘quit’ Twitter. Knowing that many people have no account other than in Twitter I will keep sending copies of my dents/diaspora posts/Pleroma posts/toots into it.

Twitter as a company deserves to collapse. Like Facebook, it has artificially inflated the number of users; it lies to advertisers and gives a false impression/perception of scale. I predict that Twitter won’t last more than a decade (from now). It had lost billions before it began ‘squeezing the goose’ and now the goose is in its deathbed. RIP, Twitter. I won’t miss you when you’re gone.