I’ve been on Twitter for almost a decade now. In truth, I have no idea why I joined Twitter in the first place, and I rarely posted to it in 2009. In 2010, I began using it to promote the After The Fact podcast, and my usage spiked considerably. Over the years it morphed into my “author” account, leading into and following the publication of Construct. Through all that time, it was also my personal social media space, where I’d post about any random thought that came into my head. Over that time I’ve controlled a total of five Twitter accounts: @GeekElite, @AfterTheFactPod, @TradeSecretsPod, @ChroniclerSaga, and – most recently – @PixelartMeeple. Now, all but one of those are gone (and the last is effectively a placeholder).
Back when I started on the platform, I thought – like most people I knew, honestly – it was stupid. How could you convey any manner of thought in 140 characters? Little did I know… My early years on Twitter I discovered one potent aspect of the platform that kept me coming back: Access.
People had their guard down back then. You could Tweet at minor celebrities and actually get a reply. After we started up Trade Secrets, I started talking to my favorite comic book creators on Twitter, and would get into actual conversations with people I openly admired. If you go back and listen to the early years of Trade Secrets, we have interviews on that show with creators like Cullen Bunn, Kelly Sue DeConnick, and Matt Fraction – people we’d never have the same kind of access to today. And it was all because we’d built an initial rapport on Twitter.
Over the years my Twitter usage grew significantly. In all my 10 years on the platform my follower count capped out at just over 500, but I also wasn’t pushing real hard for followers. I was enjoying my time interacting with people I never thought I’d get to talk to. It helped us garner podcast listeners, and eventually helped me to promote my debut novel. I thought I’d be on the platform for a long time. Until things turned dark.
Look: I’m a middle-aged, white, cis, heterosexual man. I don’t have the kinds of problems on Twitter that women, people of color, non-binary folks, and other minorities have on the platform. I’m not assaulted by nazis and Trumpists, I generally don’t get trolled unless it’s in good fun. But people I know do. Friends. Acquaintances. Colleagues. And Twitter does nothing about it. In their wishy-washy corporate stand for “fairness”, their mush-mouthed, limp-dicked platitudes about solving the very real issues Twitter has raised in society in general dig into me like a splinter. As a platform, they refuse to take a stand, and I can’t abide that anymore.
But I’ll be totally honest: That’s not the main reason I left Twitter. I left because it’s a goddamned productivity sinkhole.
Twitter – like all social media platforms – is designed to mine your attention. You’re not a customer, you’re an asset. Your eyes being glued to their site is what makes them money, because they can point to those numbers and sell ad space. And in order to keep those numbers rising, they’ll employ every psychological and sociological trick in the book to keep your attention. To stoke your FOMO so you keep logging back in, keep scrolling through shit you’ve already seen, keep clicking on shit you don’t even want, keep arguing about shit you don’t really care about, keep feeding the algorithms that tell them they can mine X-hours of engagement per user every day.
And those hooks work on me like a goddamned charm. I’d surf Twitter on my phone at every opportunity. At dinner, in the bathroom, in bed at night, first thing after waking up. Every single moment of “downtime” I had, I’d be on Twitter filling that space with bullshit. I’m the guy – and I’m definitely not the only one, admit it – who’d close down the Twitter app on my phone at night, then look at my screen and absentmindedly just click the goddamned icon and open it up again.
This is the main reason I don’t believe they’ll ever actually solve any of the problems they have with abuse: because it’s not in their best interests to do so. They’ll continue to treat their users like shit in favor of numbers, keep trying to code algorithms to solve very human, very nebulous issues that require the judgment calls of real people. The problem is their judgment is genuinely faulty, if they even decide to employ it at all.
Their systems fucking work. These behaviors are not a mistake. They’re neither unintentional nor harmless. As innocuous as you may think this behavior is in the moment, this is the result of engineers and psychologists doing everything in their power to design as system that keeps you glued to its interface, whether it’s good for your productivity or not. It is absolutely a designed addiction, and it’s completely uncontrolled at the moment. Silicon Valley is moving so fast in this direction, doing everything they can to manipulate peoples’ attention, and there are zero regulations to put a damper on it.
But that’s a little more ranty than I’d intended to get here. The point I’m trying to make, from a personal standpoint, is that all that psychological design and social engineering worked so well on me that it destroyed my productivity. For years. The attention economy has very real, very negative connotations for sustained, thought-intensive work, and that’s exactly what I was suffering from. And not only did it keep me glued to their platform, but it made me feel bad for wanting to leave. It made me scared to leave. Realizing how irrational, ridiculous, and very likely manipulated that fear actually was is what finally made me pull the trigger.
The closest I’d ever come to deleting my account in the past was in October of 2018, when I downloaded my Twitter data and almost – ALMOST – deactivated my account. But I backed off. I started questioning my own decisions, wondering if all the negativity I felt toward the platform, all the frustration and anger building up inside me, all the productivity loss, was actually Twitter’s fault. The platform as a whole had gaslighted me into thinking it wasn’t.
But it was. And the moment finally came when I got frustrated and angry on Twitter, at Twitter, and when I thought about deleting my account it didn’t generate any fear or anxiety. Only calm detachment, and some curiosity about what it would mean. That was the sign, to me, that I was done. That I can no longer abide the combination of attention mining, apathy, and genuine insidiousness that makes up Twitter as a company and a platform, and could no longer tolerate it’s effect on my life.
So, here I am, Twitterless after almost a decade. I’m not as calm and detached as I would like to be. I’m definitely nervous I’ll lose contact with some of the people I feel I’ve become friends with via the platform. That fear isn’t nebulous, either, it’s rooted in experience. I left Facebook a couple of years ago for similar reasons, and I’ve entirely lost contact with quite a few people I thought were my actual friends. Like, full on ghosted. If I’m not on Facebook, it’s like I’m not alive.
And I know that’ll happen again. I put out a call on my Twitter account a few weeks ago, asking my 500+ followers if anyone would even care if I left. I got two replies. No one gives a shit. But removing myself from social platforms like this shrinks my world. That’s the one negative effect that I’m struggling with. I have alternative methods to keep in touch – events I run, Slack channels, Discord – and no one wants to engage me there. I can cope with cutting myself off from insignificant interactions with a wide swath of people. What’s harder is coming to grips with cutting off meaningful interactions with the few I enjoyed interacting with. And narrowing others ability to interact with me.
I can only hope the positive benefits outweigh all of that.
For further info on some of the ideas I only barely touched on here, read Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter and Deep Work by Cal Newport.
