To tweet or not to tweet
Is Elon Musk going to make Twitter worse? And would that be OK?
In some ways, it would be good for me if Elon Musk makes Twitter terrible. I spend way too much time there. A glance at my profile shows that I have tweeted roughly 39,600 times since I joined Twitter 13 years ago this month. That’s more than 3,000 tweets a year, or about eight tweets EVERY DAMN DAY. I rarely have eight coherent thoughts in a day, much less eight that are worth sharing with the rest of the world.
Twitter is especially seductive because there are several ways to get hooked. Some people are doomscrollers, unable to stop reading the awful news that Twitter can provide in abundance. Some are shitposters, flooding the timeline with made-up facts or personal attacks or dumb arguments. There are automated accounts designed to go after people who post on certain subjects. Almost every day there is one unsuspecting person who catches absolute hell.
It can be an awful neighborhood.
But like in most awful neighborhoods, there are places where somebody has kept up the house and planted a little garden. My friend Chris Jones, who used to have bare-knuckle brawls on Twitter, reinvented his feed as a place for kind thoughts and the occasional horrifying and hilarious personal story. Others use it to do actual good work—Spencer Hall and Holly Anderson, my favorite college football writers on the Internet, raised more than $800,000 last year for a refugee program in Atlanta. They’re doing it again this week, and as a bonus, they encourage donating in a way that trash-talks your rivals. (Georgia fans are already donating in multiples of $33.18 in honor of the score of the college football national championship. We were the 33. Alabama was the 18. Just for the record.)
It’s impossible to avoid all the sludge on Twitter, especially if you’re using it to catch up on the news of the day … but it is possible to prune most of the deadwood to make the experience more enjoyable. People on Twitter are already pre-dreading what Elon Musk might change—for example, many of them are convinced that he’ll invite Donald Trump back.
But I’m not so worried about that right now. The mute and block buttons are powerful tools. The bigger question for me becomes: Even if I enjoy Twitter, is it still worth the time?
What worries me the most is how Twitter is rewiring my brain. When I worked at the newspaper and wrote columns that fit in the same box every day—that rail down the left-hand side of the page—I started seeing the whole world in that box. Every time I met someone or did something new, part of my brain started trying to figure out how I’d turn that experience into a 500-word story. It was a great trick for the job but not so great for my life. The box became a cage, and it took real effort to bend the bars so I could think in different ways.
Now I’ve started to think in tweets. That’s even worse in a lot of ways, one of them being that I don’t get paid to tweet. In fact, in a very real sense, all of us on Twitter have been working for Twitter this whole time, for free.
I’ve seen a lot of people over the last couple of days say they’re leaving Twitter now that Musk is taking over. I’m not so worried about who runs Twitter—I’ve come to realize that pretty much anything I enjoy online is owned by some dodgy billionaire. I’m a lot more worried about what Twitter is doing to the people who use it.
Among other things, Twitter is a great way to promote your work. I have podcasts and commentaries and Substack posts and a book coming out down the road. I’m not sure I can afford to just throw Twitter over the side. But whether Elon Musk changes it or not, I’m the one who needs to change. As I was writing this, I thought that maybe it should be a Twitter thread instead. But it didn’t need to be. It’s fine right here, by itself, outside those little boxes.