get in loser, we're getting off twitter

two jobs, five projects and a few viral tweets later, i'm starting to look for internet magic in other places

If you are a writer, an engineer, a designer, a marketer or have whatever other cursed occupation that has benefited from you spending a few hours a day on twitter.com in the past few years, I think I know how you feel. 

Twitter…is an interesting place. I feel like most of the time we hate Twitter. It makes us feel bad, it gets overwhelming, and it boosts all the wrong people. There are days when I open the app and see a bad take after a bad take topped off by an announcement that the worst person I know just came into an obscene amount of money. I say “I gotta log off” and close the app. And then in less than an hour, I am back there. Scrolling. 

Twitter is so immersive that whenever something big happens, whether it’s national elections, January 6th or a bunch of too online people attempting to buy a Constitution at an auction at Sotheby’s, it feels like the whole world is watching it happen. And if you look away for even a moment, you are risking missing out on the biggest event of the century. That is, until you finally put your phone away or shut your laptop for a second and realize that, actually, most people around you are going along with their day, unaware and uninterrupted by whatever is trending that day. And sometimes - it’s a good feeling to be in the know of something small, early and exclusive, like when you’ve been using Clubhouse for months before your normie friends started talking about it. But most of the time, it leaves me with a feeling that my brain can only handle that much, and stuffing it with all the upsetting crap that Twitter makes me think is important is not a good way to live. It’s one thing to live tweet through a presidential election every few years but it’s another thing to log onto a website where the richest men in the world along with an army of their blind supporters are trying to get a reaction out of you on a daily basis. 

Twitter is the smallest mainstream social media platform but it’s uniquely good at a couple of things: attracting high-value users and making you feel like anyone is reachable - a tech CEO you admire, a politician you hate, your favorite writer, a company you want to intern for - the list goes on. You can send them a DM or try to get their attention publicly, and the more you spend time hanging out on that website, the more DMs and opportunities open up to you. Unlike any other social media platform - be it Instagram, LinkedIn or TikTok - where the divide between influencers and followers is clear, DMs are pay-walled and people are hard to reach, Twitter has always felt horizontal. Blue check mark or not, no one is safe and everyone has an opportunity to go viral. 

People love talking about the fact that Twitter has no creator and monetization tools in place but actually, it’s kind of fun that most of us were making absolute fools of ourselves on that platform just for the love of the game. Twitter didn’t put money into your bank account the way YouTube or even TikTok do, but it opened many interesting doors if you used it wisely. For example, while my business school classmates were taking professional headshots and writing “I am pleased to announce” posts about their Big Four internships on LinkedIn, I was working on an app that only lets you say “gm” with my friends on Twitter, getting paid to post memes from a brand account, and subtweeting tech bros. And somehow, it brought me into a far more interesting place in my career than an Associate at a Big Four. 

Watching Twitter fall apart now is complicated. The place is toxic and long-term, we’d probably all be better off without it. But like every toxic relationship, this one also has its good parts. To me, Twitter right now feels like staying with a guy you want to break up with but don’t quite find the strength to do so because of all the trivial ways being on your own again would make your life inconvenient - from things like paying for your own streaming account to rebuilding your friendships. People on Clubhouse talking about Clubhouse made that app more and more unbearable until it disappeared from our culture like it never happened. People on Twitter talking about Twitter, and the Twitter leadership stirring up discourse about Twitter to boost the DAU metrics short-term is making the experience of being on Twitter more and more unbearable. I wonder what it’s like to be on Twitter and not be in the tech Twitter bubble but to me, the discourse about the app itself has been a prominent part of the platform for the past few months, and unlike other main characters and topics of the day, the week, the month, this one is, unfortunately, here to stay. We are essentially logging into Elon’s microblog against our will every single day because even when you have “elon”, “musk” and all other possible variations of his name muted, he still finds a way into your feed through screenshots, quote tweets and trending topics. The guy is not going anywhere, he literally owns the app. 

Just like in the toxic relationship you are hesitant to break off, there are intense moments when it feels like leaving is necessary, inevitable and the right thing to do. Like when people freaked out and posted their goodbyes the night when half of Twitter stuff didn’t choose to be “extremely hardcore”, flocked to making accounts on Mastodon, and figuring out the password to their old Tumblr account. What makes those toxic relationships hard to leave though are the long periods of time when things are okay. It’s when you start thinking about all the ways you got used to being in a relationship, all the things you will have to do on your own if you go through with your plan, all the little things that tie you to your toxic partner and make it hard to pull the trigger. Like when I realized that for the past few years, I’ve done the majority of my professional and even social networking on Twitter. Twitter got me my first job out of college and the job that I have right now, friends in a new city, connected me to people who are ahead of me in my industry, and most importantly, made me feel like a part of a community where I had a voice. So, if Twitter did, in fact, disappear overnight or I decided to quit it, I would need to find a different community, figure out how to rebuild and grow my professional network elsewhere, and brush up on my real life people skills. 

And the weird thing is that even though we love to bash the big social media apps for being unoriginal and copying each other’s features, once “Twitter might shut down” became an option, people couldn’t really figure out where to go. Substack is too one-sided and long-form, Reddit is “too weird”, and it’s been way too long since we logged onto Tumblr. And why in the world do we need a social network running on decentralized servers? Turns out that the Twitter community and the way we interact on the platform is unique and can’t be easily migrated elsewhere. 

Right now, we are in one of those longer periods of time when things feel tolerable - Elon and the army of his followers are going fully alt-right but you still get to laugh at White Lotus memes. Change feels like a burden. Maybe Twitter can be run by a third of its original staff after all. It might not have broken down overnight, it might be a while before it declines, and there is always a chance that it might just come back, better than ever. Yet, the one thing that should be clear is that if you use Twitter with any goal other than getting in family-dinner-style political arguments and doom scrolling on a daily basis - be it promote your work, find friends, network, share your thoughts about the White Lotus finale, or crack a joke that you thought of while in line at a grocery store - you should be thinking about how to do all all that outside of Twitter. 

Personally, I’ve heavily used Twitter for professional purposes. It might seem like all I’ve done was scroll though memes and make jokes about hot girls in tech and tech bros, but the end game for me has always been to infiltrate tech, build a platform, promote my work and the work of a brand I work for. The rest was a nice bonus. 

For a long time now, even before the Elon takeover, I’ve felt like I have locked myself into a tech Twitter bubble where discourse and jokes became boring and recycled. The world opened up and the people who have things going on became less online. I’ve grown out of tech Twitter the way most people grow out of their hometown when they leave for college, and then grow out of their college town when they start building a life elsewhere. There are only so many times you can use new memes and new formats to tweet about the same five topics that resonate with people within this community. 

The past few years on Twitter have been a wild ride for me. At some point, posting your work and getting the right people to amplify it was more powerful than getting a mainstream media article written about you. People raised rounds of funding, launched companies, sold companies, got their dream jobs, contracts, and opportunities - all because they invested some time and effort into navigating a small Twitter circle. Twitter also wasn’t only a place for promotion. It was a place where things like ConstitutionDAO or gm app originated, were executed and grew popular. 

Things won’t be the same. Elon desperately wants to be the center of attention, the leadership is doing everything to boost the $8-paying users and the more interesting crowd whose attention you want is already starting to leave and explore other platforms. We are competing for attention and trying to build community in between Elon’s uninspired daily “jokes” and alt-right troll takes. 

The night I was getting ready to announce pager’s seed round was the same night the “Twitter 2.0.” decisions were due, and I was feverishly wondering if Twitter would even be up the next morning. We ended up going live at 8 am ET - way before a usual 10 am posting time that gets both East and West Coast to make sure some news from Twitter HQ wasn’t going to take all the attention away from our special day. 

Quitting Twitter will be challenging and it won’t happen overnight. I’ve got a few ideas, like getting as serious about TikTok as I once was about Twitter, writing more frequent and short pieces on Substack, going old school and reaching out to people directly via email, keeping an open eye and mind to Post and Mastodon…and honestly, living more fully and doing better work to let it speak for itself without the boost that “followed by X,Y, Z” on Twitter used to give me.

I’ve been too comfortable for too long, and I am excited to find the same internet magic that Twitter once showed me in new places. And I know that the earlier I accept the challenge, the faster I will be able to move on.