Why Am I Still on Twitter?
As a perpetually struggling freelance writer with a website, Substack newsletter, podcast and books to promote I have long viewed Twitter as a necessary evil. Then Elon Musk took over and the site went from bad to worse.
It’s always a little jarring when the virtual place you go to waste time is suddenly overrun by White Supremacists, the Alt-Right, Tucker Carlson, The Babylon Bee and hate-mongers of all stripes.
It would not be accurate to say that Twitter used to be a nice place. It would be more honest to say that it used to be a LOT less terrible than it is now.
Yet I still have a hard time quitting the increasingly less popular social media giant for any number of reasons, some of them valid, some less so.
One of the reasons I’m still on that awful site is because I have spent over a decade building a following there that includes a lot of famous, impressive people who obviously started following me when I was writer for The A.V. Club and could help their careers and forget to unfollow me when I pretty lost all the power I once had when I became a full-time independent.
When you’re broke, seemingly unemployable and your career appears to be in an endless free fall it’s hard to give up the validation of talented, accomplished and popular folks ostensibly being interested in what you have to say.
It’s also tough to give up Twitter because I am addicted. For the last few months I regularly find myself logging onto Elon Musk’s hideous baby, being disgusted by what I see and then wondering why on earth I regularly visit a site I hate and that makes me miserable.
The tricky thing is that I do not think before I go to Twitter. If I did think, even a little bit, I would find something better to do, like hit myself in the dick with a rusty hammer.
Instead my brain and hands automatically go to Twitter and a few other addictive places, like Facebook and Reddit without me even thinking.
I have been conditioned to mindlessly consume the random nonsense vomited online by strangers. It’s not a healthy habit at all but like most unhealthy habits it is proving to be a motherfucker to quit.
One of the things that I hate most about the new Twitter is that rather than have me see the tweets of people I follow and whose thoughts and opinions I am interested in I instead have to begin by reading the accounts of people Twitter thinks I should be interested in.
In a crazy twist, this algorithm invariably seems to think I am fascinated by what Elon Musk has to say. I literally have to block him, something I have done repeatedly, to avoid Twitter shoving his inane, unwanted thoughts , terrible memes and excruciating jokes down my throat.
Then there’s the Blue Check Army. In a pre-Musk era you actually had to accomplish something to get a blue check. You had to, I dunno, coin a phrase that entered the cultural vernacular or established yourself as the world’s preeminent expert on “Weird Al” Yankovic, to throw out two totally random examples.
The nice thing about the blue check switch is that before, if I wanted to know whether someone was a right-wing, boot-licking, billionaire-worshipping reactionary asshole I had to visit their profile and check out their tweets.
I don’t have to do that anymore. A blue check now means that the proud owner of that stupid badge is a reactionary troll/Elon Musk super-fan delighted to give one of the richest men in the world eight dollars a month as a sign of slavish, unthinking devotion.
Twitter is now a right-wing social media site, a slightly more respectable version of Parler.
Yet that does not keep me from getting legitimately angry at the bone-headed, clearly wrong and hateful things being expressed on Twitter and feeling like I should react. I know how pointless that is. Over the past decade or so I have maintained a 0.00 rating for changing people’s minds through clever social media responses. After all, if reactionary Alt-Right trolls were open to honest debate and having their minds changed they wouldn’t be reactionary, Alt-Right trolls.
I now find Twitter even more distasteful than before. I wish I had the luxury of deleting my Twitter account but I am just barely getting by and Twitter remains, for the time being, a valuable avenue for self-promotion, something I unfortunately need at this point in my life and my career.
Also, I am a creature of habit and there’s something a little daunting and depressing about having to start all over again on a site that might not have much of a future.
So I remain unhappily at Twitter but I am at least going to try to wean myself off one of unhealthiest habits. And I’ve got my share!
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