For the past few months, I’ve been debating when I will post my final tweet. Maybe that technically occurred this week, since Twitter is now “X” and Elon Musk has decided to “bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” This is fine with me, as I’ve coincidentally been working on a new app that has a bird in its logo:
Yet another app? Bear with me. Seabird is not a Twitter clone. One of the things that has surprised me about the raft of new Twitter competitors is that, despite some substantial backend differences, they all offer more or less the same microblogging format: short posts that can include text, links, pictures, and sometimes videos, presented in an algorithmic or chronological feed, with something like a retweet feature to amplify or quote a post. Pointing this out isn’t necessarily a criticism. Twitter is bad now, so I’m rooting for at least some of these similar competitors to take its place. (For what it’s worth, Bluesky is my favorite so far and the one where I’m most active. We’ll see what happens with Threads.)
Seabird takes a different approach. With my partners Jay Mutzafi and Courtney Knapp, we’ve been working on this project since before Musk’s Twitter acquisition, building an app more narrowly focused on sharing writing and other media. It’s the kind of app we ourselves want to use, inspired in part by what we miss about the pre-social media era and the golden days of blogs and Google Reader. We’ve kept details close to the vest, but now that we’ve soft-launched the first versions of our mobile app we can start talking about what makes Seabird unique.
On Seabird, we intentionally limit both the kinds of posts users can make and how frequently they can post. Posts are presented chronologically from the users a person follows. Posts on Seabird have to include a link to external content and users get only three of them each day. A typical post is a link to an article with a brief note recommending it:
There are a few ways to interact with posts, most obviously by clicking the link to read the article. Users can also bookmark them to read later or hit the like button. But my favorite feature is one that I hope longtime bloggers will enjoy: we’re bringing back the hat tip!
Back in the blogging era, it was customary to offer a “hat tip” to another blogger when they brought something interesting to your attention, via a link back to their original post to give them credit and thanks. It was a nice gesture and also helped lower-profile writers get discovered when a popular blogger credited them. We’ve built this function into Seabird. In the post below, for example, my friend Benjamin shares an interesting article from the New York Times. To share it on my own feed, I click the re-post button circled in yellow:
Now when I write my own post, it automatically includes a link back to Benjamin’s, enabling my followers to click over to it:
We have some additional features designed for writers, including the option to mark a post as a link to their original work so that it will be highlighted in a priority feed and collected in a separate tab on their profile, where it can act as a portfolio of sorts (or as we like to call it, their “SeaVee”). You can read more about the project here.
I’m excited about these unique features, but I’m equally excited about how Seabird focuses exclusively on sharing links without trying to do all the other things we’ve come to expect from social media. In a long post last year, I argued that part of the reason Twitter changed from being a smart, fun, and somewhat inscrutable place into a toxic hellsite is that we demanded too much from it:
[…] as much as I love Twitter, I’m not convinced there’s any way to make it more than marginally better while still keeping what makes Twitter Twitter. We expect too many different things from the site. We want it to be the fun virtual place to watch the Super Bowl, follow breaking news, find smart things to read, learn from experts, keep up with friends, make jokes about the new three-hour Batman movie, look at funny cat memes, share our Wordle scores, go viral, open our thoughts up to comment from millions of strangers, and gather for ritual combat over politics all at the same time while somehow not having the site devolve into Boschian chaos. Maybe that’s just not possible. But if we can’t fix it, we can exit and look elsewhere, at least for some of these purposes.
I’m intrigued by the various Twitter competitors that have sprung up, but I hope that none of them replace Twitter in such an all-consuming way. Instead, I’d like to see more distinct platforms and communities with different purposes. As Noah Smith wrote recently, one lesson from Twitter is that we should desire a more fragmented internet. Share your aspirational photos on Instagram, keep up with friends and family on Facebook, do business networking on LinkedIn, write essays on Substack, joke around and debate the news on Bluesky or in a private Discord server. It’s a maddening mistake to try to do it all on one site.
Elon Musk says he wants X to be an “everything app.” With Seabird, we’re proudly building a “one thing app.” That one thing is sharing and discovering worthwhile writing and other media.
With that in mind, I’d like to highlight something Ezra Klein said on his podcast a couple days ago:
But I will die on this hill. Twitter is a bad way to be informed about the world. It’s just a bad way to do it. […]
It’s about what you’re not doing when you’re on Twitter. And the best way I’ve found to articulate this is I think there’s a really profound difference between feeling informed and being informed. And I think Twitter and, frankly, a lot of things in social media, specialize in giving people, particularly jittery info-hungry journalistic types, the feeling of being informed. But the people who I think of as most informed are the ones who seem the best at not doing things on Twitter.
There’s almost nobody whose knowledge of things is really Twitter-based knowledge or communicated primarily through Twitter who I find that is where I get my information and really value it. For instance, Sam misses a feeling when it seems like everyone on Twitter is reacting to the same thing. And I would say, typically, what they are reacting to is the wrong thing reacting to.
So I have a burner account on Twitter for when I need to read something that’s on there. And I happen to have to use it on the day there was a huge amount of debate about Joe Rogan demanding or challenging or offering money for this vaccine specialist to debate R.F.K. Jr. on Rogan’s show. And everybody in my feed, like Nate Silver, everybody was commenting on this.
And they were all on the same thing. And in a way, being there made me feel like I was informed. I knew what the zeitgeist was that day. I was seeing the conversation. And it was an extraordinarily dumb conversation.
It was just a bad thing to allow into your mental space for that whole day. You would have just been better off reading a report about homelessness or whatever.
And so, to me, in terms of being informed about the world, actually, one of the really difficult disciplines is not letting the wrong mediums or the wrong people decide what you’re thinking about, not being too plugged into a conversation if you think that conversation has turned toxic, or you think the conversation has turned trivial, or you think that conversation is being driven by algorithmic dynamics that do not serve you.
I’ve certainly gotten value out of Twitter. It was a great way to stay in touch with people in the public policy sphere after I left DC in 2008, it was useful for promoting my writing, and at its peak it was smart and fun in ways that no other network has yet replicated. You can debate the extent of its recent decline, but there’s one way subjective way that Twitter has inarguably declined for me personally: a lot of the smart people I follow there post a lot less often, have stopped posting, or have deleted their accounts entirely. It’s become a less rewarding place to devote attention to.
We’ve had a small private beta of Seabird going for more than a year, and during that time I posted prolifically because I wanted to get a sense of what it’s like to be on a platform where I can only share three items a day and where there are no quote-tweets or reply threads for distracting sarcastic dunks and trivial arguments. What I’ve found is that it’s made me a better and more varied reader. I’m less likely to get caught up in the topic of the day; I’m more likely to read in-depth and explore more diverse subjects and sources. Even with a tiny fraction of the audience I have on Twitter, posting on Seabird is a more gratifying and thoughtful experience.
We’re not yet at the point where we can open that experience to everyone. We still have technical fixes and improvements that we’re working on and we need better moderation tools. We want to scale responsibly. But now that our apps are out, we are gradually welcoming new users. If Seabird sounds like something you’d like to try, I invite you to sign up on our website. As Twitter bids adieu to the birds, we’re excited to offer a sunnier place to land.
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