Good point, I've never been harassed at that level before.
I had tweeted something pretty innocuous to a journalist after the election. I wasn't screaming about an illegitimate president or anything of the sort, it was something like, "Maybe we should look at adding more members of congress, it would smooth out the electoral college and make for better representation."
Several months later, some random right-wing asshole with 50,000+ followers retweeted my comment and said something like "Hillary supporters just won't get over losing!"
Within minutes I was absolutely inundated with his moron followers / bots. Literally hundreds of responses calling me a butthurt Liberal and going through my old comments so that I couldn't just block that one.
Twitter was basically unusable for a week afterwards. Can you imagine that shit all the time? None of those people followed me, they knew nothing of me or my politics, they just blindly chase whatever signal their 'leaders' choose to amplify.
I can't, because in such a situation I would just delete my account. Spending your time responding to or blocking and reporting all of them would be maddening, for sure, but that is what gives them their "power". It's easier to click only one or two buttons and just be done with it all. Let them have their little victory. Don't let some app be the doorway through which people can try to hurt you.
A fun way to pass the time, yeah. A way to keep current with what's going on in the real time, sure. But the more personally invested you are in such a thing and the more you open up your private life and thoughts to strangers, the more devastated you will be when things go south.
Of course, even if it's not a personal identity, that's not enough to stop certain people from attacking the Twitter user's personal life.
You seem to be arguing to not use Twitter, which is just fine, I don't think it's necessary at all in my life. But I think a lot of people find a lot of value in the platform, and when there's something of value, I can see why a lot of people would rather try to keep Twitter useful rather than just abandon it entirely.
This particular issue seems ripe for a technological fix from Twitter. It should be possible to tweak your privacy settings in such a way that you can turn down noise and only focus on the tweets you are interested in. Maybe it's just my naivete as a non-user, but it seems like adding a couple of settings would help you weather such a storm:
- allow tweets only from people you follow
- allow tweets only from people you've already tweeted at
- temp-block all non-followed accounts that tweeted you in the last X hours
I think asking Twitter to fix the much larger problem of "eliminating assholes from the Internet" is counterproductive. Twitter's inherent design is flawed as it is essentially a single loud public forum, but they can at least provide you tools to handle the worst cases of spam.