It’s almost a new year, so you may be thinking about making a resolution for self-improvement in 2024. Go to the gym. Eat or drink less. Quit smoking. All of these are worthwhile ideas. Unfortunately, they’re also hard. Here’s an easy one: never tweet.
Maybe you already never tweet. Good for you! You are wiser than I was. I kicked a sixteen year habit in October. 21,000 times I opened that little text box, typed something in, and hit post. 1,300 times a year. 3-4 times a day. Then I decided I was done. I thought I would miss it, but I’ve gotta tell you, it’s great. Sometimes I still open the app to see what’s happening and come across something that I would have responded to in the past. But now I’m pre-committed to not responding. People are wrong on the internet and I simply let it go. It’s bliss.
The short case for leaving Twitter — let’s call it X, because Twitter as it used to be is gone — is that X is bad now. You are better than X. You should put your energy elsewhere.
But I’m not here to scold or make a purely negative case against being on X. The positive case is that while X goes down the tubes, other online spaces are coming up that are fun and rewarding.
The decline of X isn’t just about Elon Musk. The platform had plenty of unique pathologies before he acquired Twitter. We called it a “hellsite” for a reason, sometimes affectionately, sometimes not. It often brought out the worst in people, especially with the innovation of the quote-tweet, a feature tailor-made for uncharitable dunks. The crowd could be outright abusive. But Musk has made it worse in ways too numerous to recount here, and with which you’re certainly familiar if you follow such things.
Musk insists on being the main character of X in ways that owners of other social media platforms do not. And what a character he is. A small sampling of his recent activity could note this endorsement of the Great Replacement theory, this weird racist meme, telling companies pulling their ads because of antisemitism to fuck themselves, and running a space with himself, Alex Jones, Vivek Ramaswamy, and other lunatics and dumbasses.
It’s possible to use the site without endorsing this garbage, but this garbage is very much the face of the site now. And I’m hardly one to judge, since it took me long enough to leave, but it’s baffling to me that so many of you are still content implicitly saying, “Follow me on X, because this is the platform I choose as the place to share my work, exchange ideas, and present myself to the public.”
Before Musk took over, there were at least two compelling reasons to be on Twitter despite its many problems and even if you kind of hated it. One was that it was a useful place to link to one’s writing. The other was that despite Twitter’s small size relative to other networks, it was culturally central for journalists, academics, politicians, celebrities, and other influential users.
Neither of those conditions holds as much as they used to. Musk has been capricious with regard to links, temporarily breaking them when they point to Substack or removing headlines, for example. Both decisions were reversed, because they were obviously petty or incredibly dumb. But even now, posts with links in them are apparently downgraded by the algorithm in hopes of keeping users on X rather than clicking out. The site still has some utility for sharing links, but it’s far less than it did as Twitter; in some ways, the platform has been actively hostile to sharing your writing.
Its uselessness is compounded by the fact that so many people have left the platform or substantially reduced their use of it. I never had a huge following on Twitter (about 6,500 followers when I quit posting), but I was connected to influential writers and journalists who did. If I wrote something interesting it might get shared by them, potentially reaching hundreds of thousands more viewers. But that’s much less likely to happen now because 1) my followers are less likely to see my writing in the first place, thanks to the downgrading of posts with links, and 2) a lot of the smart and influential people I was connected to have quit or massively reduced their activity on X.
As a freelance writer myself, I sympathize with anyone struggling to build a following for their work. It’s hard! And it’s even harder with a more fractured internet. But if your goal is getting people to actually click through and read your writing, it should be clear that the usefulness of X has degraded and is unlikely to get better.
The flipside of this is that Musk’s trashing of Twitter has spurred the development of new online communities elsewhere. Personally, I’m finding the closest zeitgeist to the old fun Twitter on Bluesky, which has a smaller userbase but has attracted lots of journalists, academics, and internet weirdos (I mean that in the best possible way). When I log on there, I find smart, interesting people interacting, making jokes, and sharing worthwhile links. There’s some of that when I log onto X, but increasingly my feed there consists of smart people I know arguing with the dumbest people on the internet.
Other writers seem to like Threads, which has greater reach but is kind of boring in my experience. There’s Mastodon too. I’m biased of course, but I’m really enjoying the small but growing community we’re building at Seabird, a platform designed specifically for sharing links online. (Sign up here!)
None of these platforms yet replace the influence of Twitter, but on the whole I think that’s a good thing. The near-term future of the internet is fractured, and that’s probably healthy. As I wrote of Twitter back in April 2022:
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.
The old network you had on Twitter is never coming back, but your new networks can be exciting. Yes, it takes time to build up connections on a new platform. But maybe your networks could use some shaking up anyway. I know that after sixteen years on Twitter, mine became a bit rigid as I became reluctant to add too many new people to my feed. But early adopters are more likely to follow each other on a new network and I’m enjoying the freshness of my feeds on other platforms.
The psychedelic researcher Robin Carhart-Harris has compared the experience of neural rewiring on a strong trip to “shaking a snowglobe,” disrupting old thought patterns, creating new connections, and making space for more flexibility. That strikes me as an apt analogy for building a network on a new platform too. I’ve lost some of my old connections, but I’ve made lots of new ones. Think of it as a magic mushroom trip for your microblogging feed.
If you’re not yet willing to quit X entirely, there are some half-measures you could try. Some of my friends are now restricting their activity to only sharing their latest articles. (I no longer even do that; my only use of the platform now is to encourage people to leave it, so I’ll make an exception for this post.) Another option is to make X the last place you share things, breaking the habit of making it the first place you go. Or you could try a “dry January” of not tweeting. Pick a new platform or two and commit to exploring them for a month. If by February you’re still pining for X, no one will stop you from going back.
But really, I would encourage you to just quit. My only regret is that I didn’t quit sooner. X is bad. You are better than X. There are plenty of other options now. Find your friends and do your thing somewhere else. New year, new you, no tweets.
Recent Comments