Twitter was an important part of my life; for a decade it was the main place I hung out online. I made friends there I still talk with daily. I met the people who would become my editors, which is how I built my career. I felt a sense of community with other internet weirdos around the world. It’s a major part of why I am who I am today.
And I haven’t used it in two years. In 2022 I quiet-quit Twitter. I still post, but not really: I have an automated script that pushes links for my articles there. I also set up Beeper so that DMs still get to me, which I recommend—I can stay on top of that without ever logging in.
Other than that, though, I’m gone. I don’t scroll, I don’t reply, and I don’t see ads. At some point, I assume, Beeper and my automation will break, at which point I’ll delete my Twitter account.
If you’re reading this, and still on Twitter (which is now, of course, X), it’s probably because you’re thinking of doing the same thing—but something is keeping you there. I’ll share what I was thinking before I left; maybe it will help you decide. I’ll also talk about where I’ve found community online since leaving.
Twitter is already dead
Twitter was important to a lot of people for a lot of reasons, and many of them have left. I’m writing this two days after XOXO, a conference full of idealists who believe the internet can be a force for good in spite of everything. The collective mourning for Twitter at the festival was palpable.
And that makes sense: Twitter was a website where people could hang out, crack jokes, build things, and possibly even solve problems. There are so many beautiful projects and friendships that started on the site, not to mention valuable activism. But that was all a long time ago. The truth is that Twitter has been more bad than good for most people for a long time—way before whatshisname bought it.
I am not here to glorify the early days of Twitter. The truth is that the site, and the community around it, has always had problems. At some point, though, the negatives of the site outweighed the positive. The exact time this happened is going to vary from person to person, but for me I think the shift began around 2014. If you don’t know what Gamergate is, great: Keep living your life. But something about that particular harassment campaign destroyed my ability to assume goodwill. Going viral shifted from being a reward to a punishment, and in general everything felt less fun.
And you know what? There’s no good reason to stay on a social network that isn’t fun. The exact time that shift becomes necessary might differ for you—there are a lot of factors—but I encourage you to at least pay attention as you’re scrolling. Are you enjoying yourself? Or learning things? Or are you just generally feeling kind of bad?
My brain works better now
In 2020 my therapist asked me if I needed to have Twitter for my job. We’d only done two sessions together and she already knew that the website was bad for my brain. This was during the depths of lockdown, when the thought of giving up one of the tools I was using to feel in touch with the world felt impossible.
She was onto something. When I left Twitter in 2022, I noticed rather quickly that I felt less anxious. I think a big part of this is that I’m no longer exposed to a constant stream of negativity. At some point, the main thing on Twitter became people intentionally saying horrible things to get attention and people who should know better giving them attention by dunking on them. And sure, sometimes those dunks were funny, but the thing about spending all day making fun of terrible people is that you’re spending a good chunk of your day giving attention to terrible people.
The things you pay attention to shape your brain. Twitter, for me, was shaping it to be worse. I was astounded at how much less anxious I felt after leaving, and how much easier it became to focus on work and enjoy hobbies. I don’t know if the same benefits await you, but I believe there’s a good chance you’ll be surprised.
I found new (and better) online spaces
The past few years have been about slowly teaching myself to enjoy the internet again. I primarily hang out on Mastodon right now, and I enjoy it a lot. I’ve reconnected with some of my favorite people from Twitter and met plenty of new ones. I also find that people there that actually click links, read the articles, and respond to specific points in the article instead of just reacting to the headline. The fact that this felt surprising only goes to show how terrible a place Twitter became, and how low my expectations for online interaction had gotten.
An even bigger revelation, though, has been starting Connectivity, my newsletter. It’s not huge at this point—only 300 people or so—but it’s given me more of a feeling of community than any social network has in a long time. People write back to me. Some are friends, some are family, and some are strangers, but plenty of good conversations have started there.
These approaches may or may not work for you—you may need to try something else. My point is that you can rebuild online community in other places, and putting in just a little bit of effort can remind you why online community is valuable in the first place.
Sometimes things end and that’s okay
Multiple XOXO speakers, not to mention people I talked to, referred to the social network as “zombie Twitter,” which is a great descriptor. The soul of Twitter is gone, and has been gone for a while. What remains is a husk of the thing that was, walking the earth long after the end of its natural lifespan.
There’s a moment in most zombie movies where a character needs to kill or abandon the zombie of a loved one, usually while another character says that the loved one in question is already dead. And that’s what I’m here to say: Twitter is already dead. I’m grateful, in a way, that whatshisname rebranded the site, allowing us to separate the site that was from the site that is.
Twitter is dead. We can mourn that, and we should. But part of mourning is moving on.
