So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Yes, I know the social media saying. “This isn’t an airport. You don’t need to announce your departure.”

And yet, I’m announcing my departure — from Twitter. And since a lot of you got to know me and my work there, I thought I’d make a short post explaining why.

When Elon took over Twitter, and immediately started making it worse, I told myself that I should stay for at least a little while because (1) Twitter was still the best place to get breaking news and a terrific place to discuss current events and (2) I still had a large platform and maybe I could still do a little good by offering historical perspective there.

My confidence in both points has been steadily fading over the last year, and that downward trend has rapidly accelerated over the last month or so.

This weekend offered a clear refutation of the first point, as the new idiot owner of the site personally recommended a pair of anti-Semitic trolls as the best source of breaking news, and countless other frauds and know-nothings cropped up as well. Those with an informed opinion have been crowded out by grifters and goons, and the result is that Twitter now makes you less informed, not more.

And the discussions have become useless too, step by step. First, Elon elevated the voices of dimwits who were willing to pay a conman $8 for a meaningless badge. Then he removed the headlines from articles, so not even legitimate news could break through. And now he’s proposing to let posters block replies from non-bluechecks as well, which will further wall us off.

It’s becoming a white nationalist cesspool like Truth Social in every way, and being there only made me feel complicit in that.

I haven’t been blind to the steady enshittification of Elon’s Twitter, but I’ve been telling myself that I still had a big platform — just under a half million followers — and the growing strength of misinformation on the platform meant I had a duty to stay and push back against it.

Except, as I slowly realized, I don’t have a big platform anymore. Engagement on all my posts is down dramatically under the new system, and a post that would’ve racked up a thousand RTs immediately is now lingering for days with a dozen or so.

I think my fellow (former) big accounts there need to realize that we’re experiencing a bit of a phantom limb syndrome. We still have a big number of followers, but they’re not actually seeing what we post and we’re not remotely having the impact that we once did (or at least thought we did).

Again, all we’re doing is giving our personal seal of approval and a sense of legitimacy to a place that’s rapidly becoming an alt-right hangout of grifters and grievance artists.

So … I’m out.

I’ll certainly miss the connections I made there, especially with people I never would’ve otherwise met, and the conversations we’ve had. Twitter did some good and I hope I was a small part of that.

But Twitter was also the site that led to endless people sending me vile threats at work, attacking my work, trying to get me fired, and even filing a lawsuit against me. I’m not going to miss all that.

I’ll still be on social media, mostly Bluesky and Threads. Say hey!

And leaving Twitter means I’ll be spending more time here on Substack too, so be sure to follow me here if you’re not already. (And if you’re able, consider becoming a paid subscriber, because that gives you access to comments, Q&As, and the new series of Work in Progress posts I’ve been sharing from the book I’m now writing.)