I listen to a bunch of podcasts while walking the dog, but since that’s a once-a-day activity during the week, they tend to pile up a bit, and I end up doing a lot of catch-up over the weekend. This sometimes has hilarious results— I’m often listening to people confidently predict the outcomes of NFL games shortly after those predictions have been proven disastrously wrong. This past weekend was one of the weirdest examples of that phenomeon, as it seemed like half a dozen of my regular pods had segments on the imminent death of Twitter, with the not-very-sub-text being that the site probably wouldn’t still be operating by the weekend.
This was a freakout that really peaked last Thursday night when a whole bunch of media Tweeters got all maudlin thinking that the whole site was about to shut down because all the people who keep it running had left. This never seemed especially plausible to me, but these things take on a life of their own, and it produced this weird carnival of “If this is my last tweet, I just want you to know that…” for a period of a few hours. Many of them from people who are still busily tweeting at 8:30-ish ET on the following Tuesday.
Since then, there has been a slow trickle of people announcing their departure for greener pastures, as if the demise of Twitter remains imminent. This seems really strange to me, as I’ve seen essentially no change in anything other than the uptick in the number of people announcing their departure. I haven’t seen service interruptions, or unusal disruptions of my timeline, or anything at all that makes the site more annoying to use. Everything seems to be basically fine, so I’m not entirely sure where the sense of impending doom is coming from.
It’s a significant enough outflow that I did the minimum needed to set up my own Bird Site Alternative— I’m now orzelc on mastodon.world, to hold the name if nothing else. I’ve only played around with it a little, though, and am not at all enthusiastic— it brings all the joys of open-source software to the social-media experience, with everything being a little more complicated than I would like it to be, because there are some power users who think the extra options are awesome for reasons they’ll be happy to explain at tedious length. I’ll check in on it somewhat regularly, but short of complete implosion of Twitter, I doubt I’ll be using it much. And even if Twitter does completely implode, I’m not sure I’d become more active with it, rather than, you know, cultivating some hobbies that involve less screaming into the void.
Of course, my relationship with Twitter has always been a little complicated, because the nature of what it is has always been an uneasy fit for me. The character limit is a big piece of that— I’m someone who’s much more comfortable generating 1500 words of prose than 150 characters— but the core issue is really a lifestyle mismatch. Twitter is deliberately ephemeral, and as such works best as a conversational medium, which means you need to be on and active at the same time as the other people you’d like to converse with. And for the most part, that just doesn’t work for me— I get up very early (usually before my alarm at 5:30 am Eastern), and consequently go to bed right around the time that Twitter conversation in English is really peaking (I’m pretty well done by 10pm most nights). A lot of the engagement that makes heavy users of the sevice really enthusiastic about Twitter takes place at hours when I’m just not really available to participate.
I’ve also soured a bit in recent years on Twitter’s utility for the primary purpose that got me on there, namely self-promotion. I was initially reluctant to sign up, but was badgered into it by the editor for my first book, who was an enthusiastic early adopter. And for a good while, it seemed likea useful source of engagement— I managed to generate some speaking engagements by tweeting, and it used to drive a fair amount of traffic to my blog posts. More recently, though, it just feels like screaming into the void— I tweet links to stuff that I post, but even when a tweet gets a significant number of likes and retweets, it doesn’t really generate any additional readers— people just like and share stuff without ever clicking on the link.
And that’s with my long-established account and 8600-odd followers and even one of the OG blue checkmarks that confirms my notability to the world. It’s just not that effective as a channel for boosting the stuff that I do best.
Some of this is a matter of akind of narrowing of topics— especially since 2016, Twitter has become more strongly associated with politics, which isn’t really my strongest suite. Some of it is also just a matter of size— as the service has grown and everybody’s follower counts have increased, it’s harder and harder for a small number of tweets to break through, espeically if they’re coming at off-peak hours, as mine tend to.
Put it all together, and I’m just not convinced that it would be worthwhile to put in the effort needed to recreate this network that already doesn’t work very well for one of it’s main purposes, especially if that’s being done via a service that makes the process kind of cumbersome. The other things I use Twitter for— staying in touch with people, sharing dopey jokes and memes, and procrastination— are things I can accomplish perfectly well with Facebook and Instagram.
(The other use case people offer for Twitter and Twitter-like services is staying informed about current events, but I think that’s vastly overrated. It’s certainly true that when major events are happening, there’s a lot of energy around Twitter, but in terms of actual information, I think it’s neutral at best and often coutner-productive. A lot of things people tweet out in the moment are just flatly wrong, and even stuff that isn’t completely incorrect is often insignificant. Being on Twitter when shit is going down gives an intense feeling of being plugged into a stream of useful news, but in the end it’s much more illusion than reality.)
Twitter has become a deeply ingrained habit for me, and probably will remain so until the service collapses or some dramatic life event forces me to abandon it. If that happens, It’s probably better-than-even-odds that I just close the book on the “microblogging” era of social media, and find some other way to waste time when I ought to be writing or grading papers.
So, yeah, that’s some self-indulgent blather, but it was taking up brain space and having typed it out, I can hopefully move on to other things. If you want to know what, here’s a button:
If you want to agree or argue with my characterization of Twitter and Mastodon, or plug some other service, the comments will be open:
I had the same thoughts regarding the trend of assuming Twitter was dying last Thursday. Just as an aside to the rest of your post, though, I’ll point out that I clicked on the link to this post from your tweet even though I’m a newsletter subscriber. Unless RSS roars back, I foresee mostly discovering long-form writing via social media in whatever form that is. 🤷♂️
I'm with you. I joined Twitter way back in 2007 and I "microblogging" actually made sense for my writing at the time. I've made some good connections through Twitter. But around about 2016 (gee, anything interesting happen in that year?) the whole platform seemed to come apart, and it got a lot worse in 2020. I have a yearly ritual of fasting from Twitter during Lent and it might be time to make it permanent. I'm definitely auditing my use of social media and seeing what's next. Want to stay engaged with readers especially with having a new book out in 2023, but is Twitter really the best for that? We'll see.