It's time to leave Twitter.

Two weeks ago, I opened X/Twitter and got pushed an ad for an anti-trans movie produced by PragerU and that was my final straw with this cesspool.

I immediately requested my Twitter archive of over 63,000 tweets over 16 and a half years. Not surprisingly, it took nearly two weeks for me to receive a link to it given how understaffed the company is.

Once I got it, I deleted my account.

I’m gone from Twitter for as long as Elon Musk continues to own it.

I’m sad about it—but actually more sad about what it has become more so than actually hitting delete. Twitter used to be a great community and it made me feel connected. I discovered and met a lot of really smart, interesting folks making a positive impact on the world there.

Unfortunately, the platform has been steadily degrading in quality since the day it was purchased by Musk. With engineering and safety teams stripped, the weeds of spam and hate have been allowed to creep in. Musk’s own tinkering with the algorithms have made the day-to-day experience less relevant for many users, with engagement falling off a cliff.

It’s one thing for me to say that Twitter just isn’t an interesting place to be anymore and so I’m going to use it less. It’s another to suggest that anyone who wants to consume my short form insights or connect with me directly needs to join a platform owned and run by someone who supports the worst antisemitic conspiracy theories.

In a free social network, you’re the product—and, for me, it’s unethical to continue to provide free content for someone without a moral compass to try to monetize to recoup his investment.

VCs occupy a hallowed position in the tech ecosystem. Our presence sells the conference tickets. We’re the checkwriters and the founders follow us around for the money. If you’re in VC, you have an outsized impact on where the conversation is happening—and it really needs to stop happening on Twitter, starting with the leaders in tech.

Look, Threads isn’t the same and Meta isn’t exactly the Red Cross. I get it. In fact, a reporter recently told me that she doesn’t love Threads because she feels like it suffers from an Uncanny Valley problem—looks like Twitter, but isn’t.

However, Threads has the best shot at gathering the critical mass necessary to be the social media water cooler that Twitter used to be. Meta is willing to plow a ton of resources into it, it has the media and brand relationships, and nearly everyone is on some other Meta product anyway.

The one interesting glitch is a mistake that Meta has made before—and that’s not appreciating the differences in desired social graphs per product. Back in the day, when Facebook was trying to kill Foursquare, it offered a check-in product, but failed to realize that I didn’t want all my high school friends or family members—my Facebook graph at the time—so know where I was at any given time. It didn’t appreciate that context was king for social graphs and it seems to have awkwardly failed again in this respect.

Instagram is a place where, for many, people connect to brands they love. They do not, however, need to get short takes on news commentary or find out if this is, in fact, actually an earthquake from their favorite flannel PJ brand. Moving the Instagram social graph over to threads was perhaps expedient, but also mostly irrelevant. They’re trying to fix that by creating a “for you” page, like TikTok, but that, too, feels wrong. I’m open to consuming rando sports clips or stand-up comedy based on recommendations, but that’s not exactly how I want to get my assessments of the Israel-Hamas conflict—from random accounts I don’t already follow or trust yet.

Either way, it’s what we’ve got and the momentum feels real. You can find me on Threads here at @ceonyc for things that look like Tweets and on LinkedIn for slightly longer form stuff (follow, don’t connect—unless you know me). I’ll be making a concerted effort to post in both places.