What was happening: Twitter, 2006-2023
Twitter! What can I tell ya? It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was a huge part my life for a long time. It was so full of art, and humor, and joy, and community, and ideas, and insight. It was also deeply flawed and profoundly toxic, but many of those flaws were fundamental to what made it so great.
It’s almost all gone now, though. The thing called X that currently lives where twitter used to be is a pale, evil, corrupted shadow of what used to be there. I keep trying to explain what we lost, and I can’t, it’s just too big.1 So let me sum up. Let me tell you why I loved it, and why I left. As the man2 said, let me tell you of the days of high adventure.
I can’t now remember when I first heard the word “twitter”. I distinctly remember a friend complaining that this “new twitter thing” had blown out the number of free SMS messages he got on his nokia flip phone, and that feels like a very 2006 conversation.
I tend to be pretty online, and have been since the dawn of the web, but I’m not usually an early adopter of social networks, so I largely ignored twitter for the first couple of years. Then, for reasons downstream of the Great Recession, I found myself unemployed for most of the summer of 2009.3 Suddenly finding myself with a surfit of free time, I worked my way down that list of “things I’ll do if I ever get time,” including signing up for “that twitter thing.” (I think that’s the same summer I lit up my now-unused Facebook account, too.) Smartphones existed by then, and it wasn’t SMS-based anymore, but had a website, and apps.4
It was great. This was still in it’s original “microblogging” configuration, where it was essentially an Instant Messenger status with history. You logged in, and there was the statuses of the people you followed, in chronological order, and nothing else.
It was instantly clear that this wasn’t a replacement for something that already existed—this wasn't going to do away with your LiveJournal, or Tumblr, or Facebook, or blog. This was something new, something extra, something yes and. The question was, what was it for? Where did it fit in?
Personally, at first I used my account as a “current baby status” feed, updating extended family about what words my kids had learned that day. The early iteration of the site was perfect for that—terse updates to and from people you knew.
Over time, it accumulated various social & conversational features, not unlike a Katamari rolling around Usenet, BBSes, forums, discussion boards, other early internet communication systems. It kept growing, and it became less useful as a micro-blogging system and more of a free-wheeling world-wide discussion forum.
It was a huge part of my life, and for a while there, everyone’s life. Most of that time, I enjoyed it an awful lot, and got a lot out of it. Everyone had their own take on what it was Twitter had that set it apart, but for me it was three main things, all of which reinforced each other:
It was a great way to share work. If you made things, no matter how “big” you were, it was a great way to get your work out there. And, it was a great way to re-share other people’s work. As a “discovery engine” it was unmatched.
Looking at that the other way, It was an amazing content aggregator. It essentially turned into “RSS, but Better”; at the time RSS feeds had pretty much shrunk to just “google reader’s website”. It turns out that sharing things from your RSS feed into the feeds of other people, plus a discussion thread, was the key missing feature. If you had work of your own to share, or wanted to talk about something someone else had done elsewhere on the internet, twitter was a great way to share a link and talk about it. But, it also worked equally well for work native to twitter itself. Critically, the joke about the web shrinking to five websites full of screenshots of the other four5 was posted to twitter, which was absolutely the first of those five websites.
Most importantly, folks who weren’t anywhere else on the web were on twitter. Folks with day jobs, who didn’t consider themselves web content people were there; these people didn’t have a blog, or facebook, or instagram, but they were cracking jokes and hanging out in twitter.
There is a type of person whom twitter appealed to in a way that no other social networking did. A particular kind of weirdo that took Twitter’s limitations—all text, 140 or 280 characters max—and turned them into a playground.
And that’s the real thing—twitter was for writers. Obviously it was text based, and not a lot of text at that, so you had to be good at making language work for you. As much as the web was originally built around “hypertext”, most of the modern social web is built around photos, pictures, memes, video. Twitter was for people who didn’t want to deal with that, who could make the language sing in a few dozen words.
It had the vibe of getting to sit in on the funniest people you know’s group text, mixed with this free-wheeling chaos energy. On it’s best days, it had the vibe of the snarky kids at the back of the bus, except the bus was the internet, and most of the kids were world-class expoerts in something.
There’s a certain class of literary writer goofballs that all glommed onto twitter in a way none of us did with any other “social network.” Finally, something that rewarded what we liked and were good at!
Writers, comedians, poets, cartoonists, rabbis, just hanging out. There was a consistent informality to the place—this wasn’t the show, this was the hotel bar after the show. The big important stuff happened over in blogs, or columns, or novels, or wherever everyone’s “real job” was, this was where everyone let their hair down and cracked jokes.
But most of all, it was weird. Way, way weirder than any other social system has ever been or probably ever will be again, this was a system that ran on the same energy you use to make your friends laugh in class when you’re supposed to be paying attention.
It got at least one thing exactly right: it was no harder to sign into twitter and fire off a joke than it was to fire a message off to the group chat. Between the low bar to entry and the emphasis on words over everthing else, it managed to attract a crowd of folks that liked computers, but didn’t see them as a path to self-actualization.
But what made twitter truly great were all the little (and not so little) communities that formed. It wasn’t the feature set, or the website, or the tech, it was the people, and the groups they formed. It’s hard to start making lists, because we could be here all night and still leave things out. In no particular order, here’s the communities I think I’ll miss the most:
- Weird Twitter—Twitter was such a great vector for being strange. Micro-fiction, non-sequiturs, cats sending their mothers to jail, dispatches from the apocalypse.
- Comedians—professional and otherwise, people who could craft a whole joke in one sentence.
- Writers—A whole lot of people who write for a living ended up on twitter in a way they hadn’t anywhere else on the web.
- Jewish Twitter—Speaking as a Jew largely disconnection from the local Jewish community , it was so much fun to get to hang out with the Rabbis and other Jews.
But also! The tech crowd! Legal experts! Minorities of all possible interpretations of the word sharing their experiences.
And the thing is, other than the tech crowd,6 most of those people didn’t go anywhere else. They hadn’t been active on the previous sites, and many of them drifted away again the wheels started coming off twitter. There was a unique alchemy on twitter for forming communities that no other system has ever had.
And so the real tragedy of twitter’s implosion is that those people aren’t going somewhere else. That particular alchemy doesn’t exist elsewhere, and so the built up community is blowing away on the wind.
Because all that’s almost entirely gone now, though. I miss it a lot, but I realize I’ve been missing it for a year now. There had been a vague sense of rot and decline for a while. You can draw a pretty straight line from gamergate, to the 2016 Hugos, to the 2016 election, to everything around The Last Jedi, to now, as the site rotted out from the inside; a mounting sense that things were increasingly worse than they used to be. The Pandemic saw a resurgence of energy as everyone was stuck at home hanging out via tweets, but in retrospect that was a final gasp.7
Once The New Guy took over, there was a real sense of impending closure. There were plenty of accounts that made a big deal out of Formally Leaving the site and flouncing out to “greener pastures”, either to make a statement, or (more common) to let their followers know where they were. There were also plenty of accounts saying things like “you’ll all be back”, or “I was here before he got here and I’ll be here after he leaves”, but over the last year mostly people just drifted away. People just stopped posting and disappeared.
It’s like the loss of a favorite restaurant —the people who went there already know, and when people who wen’t there express disbelief, the response is to tell them how sorry you are they missed the party!
The closest comparison I can make to the decayed community is my last year of college. (Bear with me, this’ll make sense.). For a variety of reasons, mostly good, it took me 5 years to get my 4 year degree. I picked up a minor, did some other bits and bobs on the side, and it made sense to tack on an extra semester, and at that point you might as well do the whole extra year.
I went to a medium sized school in a small town.8 Among the many, many positive features of that school was the community. It seemed like everyone knew everyone, and you couldn’t go anywhere without running into someone you knew. More than once, when I didn’t have anything better to do, I’d just hike downtown and inevitably I’d run into someone I knew and the day would vector off from there.9
And I’d be lying if I said this sense of community wasn’t one of the reasons I stuck around a little longer—I wasn’t ready to give all that up. Of course, what I hadn’t realized was that not everyone else was doing that. So one by one, everyone left town, and by the end, there I was in downtown surrounded by faces I didn’t know. My lease had a end-date, and I knew I was moving out of town on that day no matter what, so what, was I going to build up a whole new peer group with a short-term expiration date? That last six months or so was probably the weirdest, loneliest time of my whole lide. When the lease ended, I couldn’t move out fast enough.
The point is: twitter got to be like that. I was only there for the people, and nearly all the people I was there for had already gone. Being the one to close out the party isn’t always the right move.
One of the things that made it so frustrating was that it had always problems, but it had the same problems that any under-moderated semi-anonymous internet system had. “How to stop assholes from screwing up your board” is a 4 decade old playbook at this point, and twitter consistently failed to actually deploy any of the solutions, or at least deploy them at a scale that made a difference. The maddening thing was always that the only unique thing about twitter’s problems was the scale.
I had a soft rule that I could only read Twitter when using my exercise bike, and a year or two ago I couldn’t get to the end of the tweets from people I followed before I collapsed from exhaustion. Recently, I’d run out of things to read before I was done with my workout. People were posting less, and less often, but mostly they were just… gone. Quietly fading away as the site got worse.
In the end, though, it was the tsunami of antisemitism that got me. “Seeing only what you wanted to see” was always a skill on twitter, but the unfolding disaster in Israel and Gaza broke that. Not only did you have the literal nazis showing up and spewing their garbage without check, but you had otherwise progressive liberal leftists (accidentally?) doing the same thing, without pushback or attempt at discussion, because all the people that would have done that are gone. So instead it’s just a nazi sludge.10
There was so much great stuff on there—art, ideas, people, history, jokes. Work I never would have seen, things I wouldn’t have learned, books I wouldn’t have read, people I wouldn’t know about. I keep trying to encompass what’s been lost, make lists, but it’s too big. Instead, let me tell you one story about the old twitter:
One of the people I follow(ed) was Kate Beaton, originally known for the webcomic Hark A Vagrant!, most recently the author of Ducks (the best book I read last year). One day, something like seven years ago, she started enthusing about a book called Tough Guys Have Feelings Too. I don’t think she had a connection to the book? I remember it being an unsolicited rave from someone who had read it and was stuck by it.
The cover is a striking piece of art of a superhero, head bowed, eyes closed, a tear rolling down his cheek. The premise of the book is what it says on the cover—even tough guys have feelings. The book goes through a set of sterotypical “tough guys”—pirates, ninjas, wrestlers, superheros, race car drivers, lumberjacks, and shows them having bad days, breaking their tools, crashing their cars, hurting themselves. The tough guys have to stop, and maybe shed a tear, or mourn, or comfort themselves or each other, and the text points out, if even the tough guys can have a hard time, we shouldn’t feel bad for doing the same. The art is striking and beautiful, the prose is well written, the theme clearly and well delivered.
I bought it immediately. You see, my at-the-time four-year-old son was a child of Big Feelings, but frequently had trouble handling those feelings. I thought this might help him. Overnight, this book became almost a mantra. For years after this, when he was having Big Feelings, we’d read this book, and it would help him calm down and take control of what he was feeling.
It’s not an exaggeration to say this book changed all our lives for the better. And in the years since then, I’ve often been struck that despite all the infrastructure of moden capitalism—marketing, book tours, reviews, blogs, none of those ever got that book into my hands. There’s only been one system where an unsolicited rave from a web cartoonist being excited about a book outside their normal professional wheelhouse could reach someone they’ve never met or heard of and change that person’s son’s life.
And that’s gone now.
-
I’ve been trying to write something about the loss of twitter for a while now. The first draft of this post has a date back in May, to give you some idea.
-
Mako.
-
As as aside, everyone should take a summer off every decade or so.
-
I tried them all, I think, but settled on the late, lamented Tweetbot.
-
The tech crowd all headed to mastodon, but didn’t build that into a place that any of those other communities could thrive. Don’t @-me, it’s true.
-
In retrospect, getting Morbius to flop a second time was probably the high point, it was all downhill after that.
-
CSU Chico in Chico, California!
-
Yes, this is what we did back in the 90s before cellphones and texting, kids.
-
This is out of band for the rest of the post, so I’m jamming all this into a footnote:
Obviously, criticizing the actions of the government of Israel is no more antisemitic than criticizing Hamas would be islamophobic. But objecting to the actions of Israel ’s government with “how do the Jews not know they’re the bad guys” sure as heck is, and I really didn’t need to see that kind of stuff being retweeted by the eve6 guy.
A lot of things are true. Hamas is not Palestine is not “The Arabs”, and the Netanyahu administration is not Israel is not “The Jews.” To be clear, Hamas is a terror organization, and Israel is on the functional equivalent of Year 14 of the Trump administration.
The whole disaster hits at a pair of weird seams in the US—the Israel-Palestine conflict maps very strangely to the American political left-right divide, and the US left has always had a deep-rooted antisemitism problem. As such, what really got me was watching all the comments criticizing “the Jews” for this conflict come from _literally_ the same people who spent four years wearing “not my president” t-shirts and absolving themselves from any responsibility for their governments actions because they voted for “the email lady”. They get the benefit of infinite nuance, but the Jews are all somehow responsible for Bibi’s incompetent choices.