Another Goddamn Twitter Eulogy

Look man, I’ve lived entire lifetimes on Twitter dot com. I’ve met good friends. I’ve made good enemies. I’ve laughed, I’ve cried, I’ve mindlessly scrolled.

On October 26th, I did something I’d known I needed to do for weeks: I logged off for an extended period of time. It was a trial run for my ultimate goal of getting the hell off bird app forever. I’d thought a lot about it. This was a long time coming.

The next day, Elon Musk bought Twitter.

Musk has always been a bad poster — one of the worst — and now we see what happens when a bad poster gets his hands on the poster’s app. It took this lumpy bastard all of two weeks to devalue the blue check by making it available to anyone with enough money for Taco Bell and to fire half of his employees to own the libs. His business plan, apparently, involves both obsessively scrolling to check the site he bought with his billions and billions of dollars so that he can ban accounts for making fun of him, and accusing advertisers of violating his freedom of speech by refusing to give him money. Screaming “I’m not owned!” into the void as he slowly turns into the proverbial corncob.

In one way though, Musk is winning: he is now the entire timeline, he is Twitter. I’ve hopped back on a couple times, just to see; it’s all Musk all the time. The terminal Main Character. The Last Man.

I am not off Twitter permanently because of Musk, though Musk is pretty good insurance against me logging back on for anything other than self-promotion. I am off Twitter because the relationship is toxic. It it is bad for me, really terrible, and leaving it has made me happier.

Twitter and I are…complicated.

In 2019 I was nothing and no one: lost after graduating college, newly divorced, struggling to escape a job I hated and unsure how else to make money. Wasting my life. 

Yesterday I finished a draft for my first print feature. I’ve got another major project wrapping up next Tuesday. A smaller article lined up after that. Americafest tickets burning a hole in my pocket. I live in New York City now, like I’ve always wanted to. On a mission. Everything coming up Millhouse.

Without Twitter, none of that would have happened. Twitter gave me my first platform. Its character limit taught me economy and attention to aesthetic detail. Live-tweeting helped me realize how much I like reporting and how desperately I wanted to do it forever. My grad school application included a tweet thread as one of my three writing samples. And after giving me all that, it gave me the viral moment I parlayed into my first national byline.

That was the magic of the website: the thing we are about to lose. Twitter flattens social hierarchy. It is a place full of the people who make the news and write the stories, and you – an average person – could potentially reach those people with a mixture of cleverness and luck. There’s never been anything like it.

Stories like mine are about to become a lot less possible and a lot more rare. The door is closing behind me. That path to success is washing away.

Arrogant as it sounds and privileged as it is, I left Twitter because I already walked that path and reached that door. The majority of what remained for me on the site were the negatives; the things that were ruining my sanity and attention span and a little bit my life. 

I am, if you could not tell, ravenous for attention. I want everyone to look at me and my work, all the time, forever. Twitter takes that impulse and quantifies it. The attention game sits in my pocket and I can take it out whenever I want to and see good, solid numbers that tell me I am winning. Or losing. It’s never enough, that’s for sure. Someone always puts up higher numbers. My posts could always be better. 

“Maybe If I reach x number of followers I will finally be happy,” someone posted a very long time ago. I haven’t found x yet. No one has.

The energy sink goes both ways: you desire infinite attention from Twitter and Twitter demands the same of you. I cannot be the only person who has repeatedly experienced that awful moment of looking up from their phone and realizing the sun is setting and the room has grown dark. Hours I have sat here, about to get up the entire time, with nothing but Very Online knowledge to show for it. 

And speaking of which: my fellow Very Onlines, what an incredible number of opinions we all hold on the stupidest and most inconsequential bullshit imaginable. Is Jorts the Cat racist? Is reading the news ableist against people with ADHD? The answer to both questions is: log off. Go do literally anything else. The withdrawals suck, but once they’re gone you’ll find yourself with hours more time each day to do the things you’ve always wanted to do.

So yeah, I’m off Twitter. I’m not going back. No Mastodon either. This site was never good. The copycat one won’t be any better. 

There are things I’ll miss. The banter and those delightful, rare moments of unbridled joy and hilarity erupting on the TL. The way Twitter helped me keep up with the news without much effort on my part. The genuine sense of community. The people I’ve met, the ability to meet more people, to make connections in a world where connection sometimes feels impossible.

I knew that it would be difficult to give up these things, even with all the benefits of channeling my creative energy into writing instead of tweeting, of extra time every day and a brain not rotted by the world’s dumbest controversies. I wasn’t sure if I could do it. They say no one ever really quits.

Thanks to Musk, though, I think it’s going to stick.

What is there to go back to? A sea of people tweeting about the world’s most lumpy-faced man who makes my need for attention look like indifference by comparison? The blue-check impersonator jokes are very, very funny, but in a week the joke will have run its course and what will happen then? All Musk all the time, plus whatever fresh idiocy he dreams up for the platform. It’s over, guys, it’s done. We had a good run. A bad run. Whatever. We had a run. A time. The time is past. It’s time to go.

Twitter dies; the Substack struggles to be born. Expect posts that are less polished and more frequent. Those tweet threads I like to do, just on here instead. I hear Substack Chat is cool. Maybe we can create a different kind of community.

RIP Twitter. It’s the end of an era. For better and for worse, the Internet will never be the same without you.