Why I'm Having a Hard Time Getting Off Twitter Entirely Despite Its Spectacular Suckage/I'm on Bluesky Baby!
My oldest son will sometimes try to load a video gam and get very, very angry and frustrated.
That’s when I say, “If something is making you miserable and angry, stop doing it. It’s pretty simple.”
It’s good advice that I am terrible at taking myself.
Doom-scrolling Twitter and Facebook makes me miserable and angry, yet I am having a hell of a time ending my dysfunctional, increasingly masochistic relationship with them.
I just got a new phone from Walmart and chose not to have Facebook or Twitter’s apps on it.
I did not delete my accounts. Although it has become an AI-poisoned, MAGA-friendly cesspool over the last couple of years, it still serves vital purposes in my life and career.
I’ve made friends through Facebook. I’ve had a group in it, Society for the Toleration of Nathan Rabin, that is important to me.
Facebook makes me angry, but it doesn't make me as mad as when I go on Twitter just long enough to post a link to one of my articles, knowing I will get little to no engagement. I’m not arrogant enough to think I’m being shadow-banned, but you can only insult Elon Musk so many times, so many ways, before the algorithm decides that you're a dangerous subversive whose Kazaam piece contains harsh truths they must censor.
I used to have a love-hate relationship with Twitter. I hated how dependent I was on it, but as someone with autism, ADHD, and bipolar 2, social media has its advantages. Doom-scrolling is particularly hard to resist as someone with ADHD who constantly needs dopamine hits, no matter where I get them.
My ADHD brain needs constant stimulation. Social media provides it in a deeply unhealthy way.
Social media gives you a way to semi-engage with the world without the terror of face-to-face interaction and/or having to talk to other people, some of whom you do not know.
As a freelance writer, small businessman, and independent micro-publisher/author, I need all the help I can get. Even though Twitter is a fraction as useful/bearable as it was in a pre-Elon Musk age, I still go through the motions of posting all my pieces on there because a tiny bit of promotion is better than none.
A tweet rarely gets more than a few likes or retweets. I know what you’re saying, Nathan: that’s because you suck and nobody likes your writing.
First of all, harsh. Secondly, I’ve lost something like eight thousand followers. I went from having thirty thousand followers to having fewer than twenty-three thousand.
That’s because a lot of my followers got the fuck off Twitter for the sake of their sanity and because they didn’t want to support Elon Musk in any way, even if it’s just staying on his hell site, where his tweets are pushed on everyone.
The whole point of Twitter used to be to dunk on the right and be cheered on by people who think the same way you do—correctly. Now it’s a right-wing nightmare where anti-Trump tweets are invariably met with, “Oh yeah? What about Tampon Tim and his tampons? Or Sleepy Joe? Let’s Go Brandon, or maybe you worship Killary,” and ads for T-shirts that have messages like “Trump the legend.”
I don’t feel at home in this world. I feel like an unwanted stranger. I can’t spend too much time on Twitter without becoming apoplectic.
One of the reasons I struggle to give up Twitter completely is that I have a lot of famous and talented followers, and my fragile self-esteem still finds some comfort in that.
The greatest heroes are celebrities who still actively follow me even after I left the A.V. Club and lost my ability to help their careers. What kind of mega-celebs? I’m far too modest to rattle them off, but you can visit my feed and marvel at the followers and think that I will be losing a lot and losing nothing when I finally decide to leave Twitter altogether.
Twitter is like the rest of society: it fucking sucks, and Donald fucking Trump is to blame, followed by Elon fucking Musk.
It’s remarkable how much damage the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world can inflict when they’re motivated by hate and given free rein to recreate our country in their odious images.
My disgust with Elon Musk and Twitter led me to Threads, where I post all my articles and my droll commentary on life. Let’s just say that my feed is a little “politically incorrect.” Some of my bon mots are pretty outrageous. They’re not for the “faint of heart.”
The problem with Threads is that it’s owned by Mark Zuckerberg, whose transformation into a MAGA chucklehead has been a dispiriting development in a world full of them.
This is a VERY long-winded way of saying that I'm on Bluesky now! I have 80 followers. I need more, or my already low self-esteem will plummet further. You can follow me here: https://bsky.app/profile/nathanrabin.bsky.social.
My shit is getting ZERO engagement, and I agree with all the granola-eating, tree-hugging pinko leftists on there. I’m all, “orange man bad,” but they’re not flocking to my account!
Will Bluesky soon do a heel turn and be all, “actually, we fucking love Donald Trump?”
Hopefully not. I feel better about limiting my exposure to Twitter and Facebook, but I’ve replaced them with Reddit and The Daily Beast, and they aren’t much better. In many ways, I’ve substituted one poison for another.
Regardless, I hope to stick to my guns and keep these social media menaces off my phone.
You know, I should probably spend a lot less time on my phone, but that’s another blog post altogether.
You can pre-order The Fractured Mirror here: https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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