Twitter Quitter

Wednesday is about books and/or writing. Today it's about Twitter. And how I'm out. Done. Gone. Goodbye. So long, and thanks for all those Tweets. Yeah, thanks heaps eh...

Yesterday, I signed out of my Twitter account – deactivated it later that day. I’ve quit. I’m done. It was a series of micro-quits which befits the application’s brevity-gone-mad sequences of people just sharing 160 characters, and then again, and then again, and then again.

I woke up and decided to just remove the app from my phone. A little sanity grab, I guess.

Later that day I had decided I would need to contact a small handful of people that I connect with over direct messages via Twitter. We all have different ways of reaching people – from group chat gangs through to old fashioned email conversations and over the years I have found a few people on Twitter, and we have only communicated through that messaging system.

It wasn’t too hard. A quick generic message to say I was done, that I was still – for now – on Instagram, and here’s an email address too. Then out.

After signing out, I decided to actually deactivate. Twitter will let me sign back in sometime across the next 30 days, or otherwise obliterate my account. It’s very early days, but I like to publicly share this sort of thing, call it a public pre-shaming if you want, if I decide to do something then committing it to print or the bubbles within the internet in some way feels like the right approach so as to hold myself to it.

Me and Twitter are done.

And it’s not because of any one thing, and it’s certainly not because I couldn’t handle the trolls, nor because I ever was one. I just think Twitter is…a bit shit. I have always thought this. I have probably not ever used Twitter quite how you were supposed to, but that didn’t stop me racking up something obscene like 170,000 tweets over about 12 years or so…

Elon Musk buying Twitter and stirring the pot around trolling and enabling scraps and charging people money to be verified and allowing hate-speech to (further) flourish was perhaps the final straw for me. But I had been thinking about quitting Twitter for a long time.

I would like to say I was never really there. But 170,000 tweets can’t all be wrong. Well, they probably were, but they are still there!

Many years ago I would say to anyone that was listening that Twitter was the one I could easily live without, the social media I cared least about and didn’t really see the point of…and then I would endlessly tweet what I was reading, listening to, watching. I would share any work I’d created, any stories or blogs or reviews. This newsletter goes out instantly on Twitter in a small hope of attracting more readers. Well, it won’t anymore of course.

I started in on Twitter without really knowing what I was doing. And not much changed. But it seemed like over in a little corner of its many narrow worlds, I was just off doing my thing. And that was sometimes a strange comfort too. Such is the static hum of social media. Just leave me to be me. (While I tell everyone that I can that I’m just being me).

Social media was an easy trap for an everyday blogger, you signed in and shared your work and figured it was part of your work to do so. But then what else could you add to the conversation there besides plugs for your work? Well, I quickly decided, Twitter (and Facebook too) would be the place where I served up “the long division” – you could criticise my work, absolutely, but on Twitter I was date-stamping the ‘research’ or at least the sweat and grunt that went into it. These weren’t just daft hot takes. This was my life. And I was being a deep nerd, reading widely, listening broadly, watching anything and nearly everything. And the proof was all there for anyone that wanted it.

And that’s not meant to sound defensive or grandiose, that’s just the scheme I concocted. And subtly, it ruled my life for about a decade. And then there’s been a weird little hangover that I’m just starting to kick.

When I quit Facebook earlier this year (and no regrets, pangs or worries since) I started to spend a tiny bit more time each day on Twitter. It wasn’t instantly noticeable, but it was easily justifiable. The big time-suck was gone, so why not try to get to know that aspect of social media I’d always sorta ignored and never really used properly.

Now, eight months to the day since writing about ditching Facebook, I’m ditching Twitter.

So I’m further reducing the ‘audience’ for my content. And that sits fine with me.

My nearly 11yo son Oscar is now a content creator. He makes YouTube videos, he writes stories and recaps, he has a website, he’d love you to subscribe to his YouTube channel, he has written a book (unpublished), has made an album (available on Bandcamp) and is nearly finished another. He is working on book number two, a set of short stories and, um, something else of course…He’s nothing if not prolific, filled with a spirit of utmost enthusiasm, and the solipsism of youth; he is unfiltered and uncaring about what has already happened and whether he’s retracing anyone’s steps. Blissfully unaware. It’s just a way of getting to know the world and himself, and sometimes a way of escaping the world and/or himself.

And I applaud all of that. And I’m obviously responsible for inspiring/encouraging a fair bit of it.

But it’s interesting to see the slight desperation, already, in being devoted to a world where he is chasing follows and judging the content of others on their subscriber base, how many monthly listeners they have, how many likes they garner.

I invite him to a jazz festival show with me. He’s never heard of the act, so he asks how many monthly listeners. Doesn’t ask to listen to the music! Just wants to know that anyone else has been listening and hopes for a high number.

This sits less comfortably with me, but it’s the way of today’s world.

I guess I’m buying back a bit of myself and stepping a bit further away from that version of the world by doing things like quitting Twitter. Well, that’s my framing anyway.

“Dad, how many subscribers do you have on YouTube?” Oscar asks me one day recently. I don’t actually know but I am aware that it’s in the tens…just. So I say, “about 20 I think”. He tells me that that’s just sad. Adds the word cringe. As a full stop. Final statement. I merely shrug.

My YouTube channel was a failed experiment to promote the poetry in my book, a campaign that started to push a crowdfunding campaign – and that part was successful. The rest of the channel was just a layover, another hangover. A couple of years ago I had to make a couple of videos of me doing readings for promotional opportunities. I kept adding videos now and then. And then I stopped. Oscar kills me with one hand, offers kindness with the other. He says I need to make more videos and try harder. I need to find more subscribers.

I tell him that I’ve had my time in that particular sun. And that I’m happy for him, my son, doing what works for him. There were thousands of readers when I was a daily blog writer for Stuff for over a decade. There were tens of thousands and maybe 100,000 or even a little bit more than that some months. I do not remember the stats that were mailed out at the end of each month.

But even little old Off The Tracks got its motorway jammed, when I wrote about Neil Peart not being that good. That was only a couple of years ago, and not meant as anything more than a truth I felt – that the drumming community went gaga for a guy with no groove. And some 300,000 people read and shared and got angered by that; I was doxed.

I was doxed when I said I didn’t like Devilskin, and Six60, and, well, that one time I saw Robbie Williams…

So my time on Maple Drive has been and gone, been done and had.

And I’ll keep writing. But I won’t keep Tweeting.

And each time I resolve to sign off and deactivate, or just take a few months out to not share quite as much, it feels like a little victory, I guess. Like I’m buying back a little piece of myself.

I’ve watched Twitter crush the souls of people I know, including some close friends that have been triggered to breakdown, or certainly close. I’ve watched people I admire but don’t really know not be able to cope. And this is a stress they have brought on themselves. There should be rules of engagement, but there are not. They really aren’t there. Or there are ways around them. And you can be got. And we are all bystanders to it if we’re on the platform.

There is some need in many of us now, to be liked, to be subscribed to, to be ‘known’.

I’m not saying I climbed any sort of mountain back in the day, and just because I’m heading for my version of the hills right now, I also don’t for a second believe that I have found any one particular right answer. I just know that Elon Musk is basically Kanye West. And that Kanye West is certainly Donald Trump. And that there’s something common to all of them.

And I want as little to do with anything encircling those worlds as possible.

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