a twitter eulogy
the site's not dead yet, but it is lingering on a hospital bed
Apologies to my readers who are not interested in the trials and tribulations of twitter. Feel free to skip this one.
When I joined twitter in 2007, I didn’t know what to do with it. I tweeted out links to my blog, I made some comments about hockey, and then I didn’t post again for months. When I came back, there was a decidedly different tone; people had figured twitter out. Gone were the “figuring this out” tweets and its place were jokes upon jokes. Twitter was a laugh factory, and our job was to get on top of the favrd leaderboard, a way to prove to anyone watching that you were indeed funny.
I logged on every day in the hopes of making people laugh, and being made to laugh. And while jokes were flung far and wide, something incredible happened. We formed a community. We became friends. We went to meetups and hugged the people who provided so much friendship and entertainment. We bonded. We tweeted at each other through marriages and divorces, through births and deaths, through job promotions and layoffs. Twitter became a home base for so many of us, a safe place to send our thoughts out, a place to gather, to share, to laugh and yes, love.
All good things must pass, right? Fast forward years later and while there are still jokes, and still that sense of camaraderie, there’s an underlying toxic feel to it all. Too much news, too much parsing the news, too much vitriol. Twitter is the land of dunks, people quote tweeting idiots to make fun of them, giving widespread notoriety to the worst of the worst. It is a reckless, lawless society where people say anything to garner engagement. It is a complaint department where everyone is privy to your annoyances and anger.
And now, with Elon Musk taking over, it is all but ruined. He’s trying to monetize everything, to change the way twitter is used. It’s only a matter of time before the plug is pulled or the site becomes unusable. We’re saying our goodbyes now, we’re exchanging phone numbers and email addresses, plugging our newsletters and bylines. Twitter is in a death spiral, and we’re all standing around its bedside telling stories about when it used to be good.
I spend a lot of time on twitter. It’s where my friends are. It’s where my social life lives. It’s where I get to vent and converse and laugh and learn. It keeps me company. It gives me comfort. It’s my town’s dive bar and you can find me belly up to the bar every day, playing songs on the jukebox and engaging in lively conversation. I’m going to miss that. I will miss my friends, I will miss the laughter. I will miss having people who care, as evidenced by the way my twitter friends carried me through my marriage breakup and divorce.
But there’s an upside to twitter dying. My addiction to the site - and yes, it’s very much an addiction - has kept me from doing other things. I haven’t’ finished a book in two years. I rarely watch movies anymore. I’m constantly on my couch, laptop open, twitter loaded up. When twitter disappears, I will be free. I can’t pull myself away from it on my own, but having it pulled from me seems like just what I need. A lot of people are moving over to other social media sites, but I refuse. I want to break the ties. Once twitter is gone, I’m going to have to find way to fill the time that used to be spent telling jokes and commenting on the news. I will go outside. I will read books. I will be free from refreshing the timeline one hundred times a day. I will be free from all the hot takes and bad opinions. Oh god, I am going to be so sad for a while.
Twitter has gone from a few thousand people telling each other about the sandwich they are eating to a few million people telling you why that sandwich is bad. I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life. But I need the friendship. I need the companionship that comes with it. It’s going to be a struggle to replicate that in the outside space, but I’ll have no choice once twitter is gone, or done. I only wish I was going out on my own terms, and not at the hands of some megalomaniac who bought a new toy and immediately broke it.
I will stick around the site until its final days, a participant in a funeral in progress. I will mourn, I will get mad, I will be sad, but I will be there until the bitter end because I owe twitter that much. For what it has given me in terms of people, for the laughter, for the insight, for the companionship. I owe twitter to see it out.
I’ll turn out the lights on my way out.
Alas.