Screaming into a void

On the slow death of Twitter

The following is a lightly edited text from a Twitter thread I wrote in July 2023. I wrote it out of a sense of frustration and assumed that not many people would see it. However, quite a few did, and their responses showed that my feelings about Twitter are not isolated. I thought I’d include it in Interesting Times in the hopes that it would resonate with you too.

Tin toy clockwork bird, early 20 century.

I want to write a thread about how I feel about social media right now, about how I think it is dying, about how it is failing me personally and professionally, about how much sadness I feel about this.

I want to write about the problems this is causing me professionally because our presence on here, and whether or not our posts are seen and whether or not we can find and connect with each other, are now so mediated by algorithms that I feel like I am screaming into a void every day. I can no longer promote at scale. This is a big problem for me.

And I also want to write about how, before the algorithms got so heavy handed and choking and before Elon made this site nasty and silly, Twitter used to be the most wonderful platform for serendipity: Those gloriously off-piste encounters that lead to connections with people or events or ideas or content from all over the world that I doubt I would have found without social media, and especially Twitter.

I want to write about how much Twitter has meant to me creatively, in its hey day supplying a steady stream of art, poetry, quotations, links to articles or events, threads from experts, and other incredibly rich and eclectic content. I hate coming on Twitter now, on seeing the failure of something that, if it had its (serious) problems, also had its beneficial side. I am persevering only because there is still on Twitter the remnants of a network of people who have been incredibly dear to me over the last few years. But as things are now, they probably will not see this.

I am writing this with a lump in my throat and probably no one will read this and that's what being on Twitter means now. And I want to write about how I feel like there is nowhere to go, now, because the Web 2 version of social media has failed. Threads or any other part of the Meta empire? No. Just no. I think Meta / Facebook is ethically rank. I am on LinkedIn, and I loathe it, the way it wants us all to be interchangeable corporate clones. And its algorithms loathe me. Mastodon: nice but a bit dull. Pinterest: crammed full of great content but SO mediated by algorithms.

Every single platform available to us has the same model: designed to deliver on a business model that needs for us to offer up free content, unhealthy amounts of our time and focus and attention, our connectedness to each other, our data. All social media wants to inform and direct and inflect and control our interactions so that we and our data can all be demographically sliced and diced into neat packages to be onsold. And I don't want to be in service to that.

And I feel exhausted.

I want to write about how the promise held out by Web 2 social media was a democratic and free flowing exchange of ideas and affective energy, where content could stand on its merits and not on how it is judged by an algorithm. That promise has failed.

I want to write about how much social media now disgusts me. About how much it wastes my time as a sole trader trying to market myself. About how much it disappoints and frustrates me personally. I don't want to do it anymore BUT - and this is a big but - the failure of social media means that my world is smaller. I love my culturally active city of Melbourne and I love, very much, the friends I have here. But there are things and people that I found on social media that I would not have found anywhere else and with the failure of social media I won't be able to go on finding them. My horizons have shrunk. I don't know how much longer I will be on Twitter. Maybe Twitter's engineering or financial problems will finally overwhelm it completely. Maybe I'll just get up one day and find that my disgust has overwhelmed me and I just can't be here anymore. I don't know.

I guess I wanted to write about my grief over this. About how much my Twitter friends have all meant to me.

But I don't have the words. And, if I did, they would be buried by algorithms anyway.

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Postscript:

I came across this quote in one of the terrific articles written by

Tim Dunlop

:

“None of this should be taken as de facto endorsement of social media. In the past, I’ve been willing to suggest that to be the case, but the last twelve months or so—especially since Musk destroyed Twitter and made it, literally, X—has shown that that era of hope has also now been taken from us by the authoritarian and extractive forces of platform capitalism. For a little while there, progressives had some wriggle room in those spaces, but they have shrivelled like a snail meeting salt.”

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