I Quit Twitter For A Month. Here’s What I Learned
If a tweet falls in the forest…
I quit Twitter on December 15 last year after some BS I can’t even remember at this point but likely involved me making some Very Important Point and being disillusioned with the ensuing reaction. It probably had to do with politics, or journalism, or the awful combination of the two that often metastasizes on social networks like Twitter.
I use Twitter a lot, for work and not-work. I joined in March 2008 and have tweeted more than 21,000 times. That’s an average of more than 200 tweets a month. I have 17,000 followers, which puts me somewhere in the top 1% of all users. For a couple years now I’ve thought Twitter was mostly useless (albeit a uselessness I enjoy quite a bit), but it has been particularly awful in the run-up to the presidential election (and certainly after it), largely due to the almost universal lack of self-awareness it propagates. So I quit for a month.
Well, I quit tweeting — I was still there scrolling and liking and clicking. The first week I was literally emailing myself tweets that I wanted to send when my self-imposed exile was over. The second week (helped by the holidays) I barely checked it, looking once or twice a day, clicking on a few links and checking out. By the next week I was back to work and hanging around as part of my job, and by the end of last week I was itching to engage.
But I’m glad I kept away for a month. And here’s what I learned:
No one missed me: At least I don’t think so. No one said, “hey, I haven’t seen your critical take on important issues in awhile.” It’s like when I accidentally unfollowed someone once — it took a few months to actually figure out what happened, because while I enjoy following them, no one really consumes Twitter looking for specific people (unless all you care about is what Donald Trump says, which it seems like some previously good accounts have sadly become).
No one wins: To that point, the same arguments that were happening on Twitter when I left last month have continued, and no one has really made up any ground one way of the other. The endless outrage machine keeps running, unwavering, right next to the endless snark machine. No one is ever convinced of anything, no one ever wins.
No one cares: Slightly different from not being missed, no one really cared about the fact that I wasn’t tweeting. My close friends and family members are either not on Twitter or barely there. So for me to not be there was essentially irrelevant. I suppose that sort of undermines the point of the article here. Who cares? Twitter isn’t important to the vast majority of people.
I missed news: Being incessantly on Twitter means being in the know as news happens. Without it, I didn’t know George Michael died for a few hours and found out on Instagram strangely. I didn’t know the Megyn Kelly NBC news until about an hour after thanks to a push notification. For the average person, this slight delay in finding out something wouldn’t make much difference, but it’s something worthwhile about Twitter.
I missed tweeting: Twitter is a pretentious, provincial, annoying echo chamber, that makes conversation worse thanks to the forced brevity of the argument. It will never approach the critical mass of users that Facebook has and will always be entirely unrepresentative of the world. But there’s something fun about it. There’s something communal, club-like, enjoyable in it’s smallness. There’s also that feeling of having a tweet get hundreds and then thousands of RTs — like a combination of a winning slot machine spitting out coins and a standing ovation for something impressive. That dopamine hit shouldn’t make people feel as good as it does. But the feeling is there nonetheless. And I’m not sure I like how much I missed being part of the conversation.
