The Bluebird of Unhappiness

Ending my 16-year relationship with Twitter

Last Friday, I began purging my Twitter accounts. I watched the Redact app screen as it filled with hundreds of tweets from the last few years, one after another, a red DELETED label next to each item. It is the end of a significant part of my life, the one that looked to social media as a means of connection and a resource. For more than 10 years I earned money from my expertise with social media, training people how to use Twitter, setting up accounts, monitoring others. Twitter helped me find friends in a new city, a new career, and new opportunities.

I signed up for Twitter in the spring of 2008, after I interviewed for an account executive job at a public relations agency. The vice president interviewing me made an offhand comment about Twitter, saying he didn't think it would ever be a good place for PR. I was unfamiliar with the social network, but his attitude triggered my rebellious streak—the one that says watch me when someone says something I perceive as a challenge. I poked around on the site, navigating its features, figuring out how to compose and send my own tweets, how to find other accounts, responding to others. Soon I was hooked and determined to show that VP that yes, there was a way to use Twitter for pitching and promoting.

There was once a time when Twitter was my preferred social network: it was a place to connect with journalists, novelists, publicists, friends, former colleagues. My Twitter use opened doors for me professionally and personally, starting with several successes in pitching journalists at the PR job, using 140 characters or less. Three years later, Twitter was the subject of my first pitch to Sacramento Magazine about SacTweetup events, kicking off the start of my freelance writing career.

When did it all go wrong? To blame it all on the current owner of the platform is too easy. A combination of oversaturation, a proliferation of bots and spam accounts, and mishandling of hate speech and other bad content turned Twitter from a cocktail party full of witty, succinct and sometimes tipsy conversation to a pub crawl with too many drunken idiots to a bar fight with multiple arrests.

Twitter bird lying on its back, with X symbol on its head. Image by Teddy Lampert.

I miss the old Twitter sometimes, the same way I miss FriendFeed and old school blogging. I met a lot of people in Sacramento thanks to SacTweetup and other Twitter-centric events. I created ExploreSacto, a Twitter account focused on sharing events and other happenings; it grew in popularity and provided a platform for me to host a charity Festivus event at a downtown Sacramento pub, where we raised money and collected diaper donations for a women's shelter. I found businesses and people I could write about for Sacramento Magazine. I made some lifelong friends.

That little bluebird is no more, crossed out in late 2022. Until last week, I checked my Twitter accounts about once or twice a week to see the latest news. The US presidential election results was the end for me: I don’t want to give billionaires and fascists any more of my content, wit, or attention than absolutely necessary. I want to spend more time writing long-form content that gets my point across in a single 750-word essay, rather than spreading out my words over a long thread of 280-character tweets. If I'm going to be feeding algorithms¹, I'll do it here on Substack and not through a social network that is overrun by bots and AI with ill intent.

I doubt anyone who is still on Twitter² will miss me or my content. The people I care about know how to find me, whether in the real world or online. Maybe I'll try out another similar service in the future, or maybe I'll get rid of all my social media accounts. The thought is very tempting.

Everything is deleted now. Sixteen years of tweets, retweets, likes, and bookmarks, all gone. I'll continue to squat on my two Twitter handles, because I still have a glimmer of hope that a new owner will come in and restore the platform to its former glory. But who am I kidding? This is one bird that was already changed.

1. Or the Al Gore Ithm, as it were.

2. Yes, I know it's called X now, but to paraphrase Coming to America, his momma named him Twitter, I'm gonna call him Twitter.