This past weekend I did something I have contemplated for a while but couldn’t get myself to do. I deleted my Twitter account.
Some of you may be surprised, especially those who knew how much I promoted Twitter over the years. Others may not be, especially as I haven’t been actively using my account for well over a year and a half. Though I deleted the app from my mobile phone and stopped checking it several times daily back in March of 2020, I was hesitant to drop it altogether.
But I did, and I am great with that decision. Allow me to indulge why I did, but first how I engaged with social media and its positive and negative impacts on my life.
The Good Ol’ Days... in 2007
Social media in the mid-to-late 2000’s was not completely new, as I had a MySpace page and this blog you are reading was also new to me. As I grew followers and made connections with both platforms, I learned about Twitter, and thanks to my friend and fellow improvisor Christopher, I got an account.
But at first, I didn’t get it. What the heck could I say in 120 characters? And who would want to read it? I slowly started following and connecting with people, and using it as a way to promote my blog. Twitter inspired me to build a Web app that is resting in my project graveyard but even then, I wasn’t using it all that much.
For me, it took seeing Twitter in action – literally – to believe in it, and that didn’t happen for another year when I went to Helsinki, Finland as a participant in
Nokia OpenLab. There I met people from around the world who were heavy users of Twitter and other social media channel, and I experienced for the first time a group of people tweeting each other as they sat together. Where that latter fact was not what made me the true believer in Twitter that I became, it was continuing the connections with these people who brought me to the platform and kept me there.
Behind the short messages were people, and I got to know people not only around the world but around the corner as well. People who were interested in meeting those whom they only saw an avatar of would host Tweetups – in person meetups of Twitter connections. There are several people from tweetups I still keep in touch with today.
Beyond Shiny to a Utility
As I evolved my use with Twitter, the platform evolved as well. Business, traditional media and more individuals were coming on board, and the “invention” of the hashtag made the platform even more useful. It was becoming my primary source for news, as I could follow networks, stations, newspapers and especially the reporters of those outlets. One example of the power of Twitter was one early evening in Chicago when I saw Blackhawk helicopters flying around the Loop. I immediately took to Twitter, and right away people were chiming in on their own sightings and the media was also on the case. It was a Chicago Tribune reporter who then found an obscure mention on the city’s Web site about a Blackhawk training exercise and shared it. Shortly afterwards it made the paper’s Web site.
Twitter became a customer service channel as well, which truly embraced the collaboration that was a hallmark of social media. Starting with Comcast Cares, an account run by a Comcast employee on his own, customer service evolved on the platform, slashing through obnoxious telephone menu trees to get to the people who could make a difference. This extended beyond business, as my former Alderperson in Chicago was an active user – one day on the way to work I tweeted her a picture of a downed tree in my neighborhood, and on the way home it was gone.
The ability to connect and communicate with people you normally couldn’t or wouldn’t be able to connect with was another uniqueness to Twitter. One time I tweeted to Jack Welch, the infamous former CEO of GE. It happened to be at the time the New England Patriots were in the playoffs, and Welch, who was a Boston-area native, replied to me, “Go Pats!” Though not an intellectual conversation to say the least, it was a pleasant surprise. As I was writing book takeaways here at The Hot Iron, I was able to connect with authors and publishers to share my thoughts, as well as the occasional newsmaker and reporter covering them.
What’s Offline is Online Too
Twitter was not in its own world, as it’s obvious it was made up of those from the “meat space.” Over time I saw Twitter conversations becoming more political and divisive. As this was not just impacting Twitter but other social platforms such as Facebook, driving me to quit that platform years ago. Despite this exodus, I still held hope that Twitter could be different and more tolerable to me.
Over the last 5 years though it was really off the rails for me. I would often joke that, though not a financial advisor, I strongly recommended investing in heels, as people were simply digging their heals in and holding their ground and shouting at others. This was far, far from the Twitter I remembered from almost a decade earlier, and one I was not liking. I went as far as deleting all of my old tweets (after backing them up, for some reason) as who knows what I had said in a short message years ago that I didn’t want to come back to haunt me. Over time I was checking the platform less and less.
The Final Straws
As the lockdowns were taking effect in early 2020 and people were at home, angry, scared, or whatever they were feeling, the tweets were reflective of this. It got to be too much, and I deleted the app from my mobile device. Granted I did not shut down the account, but not having Twitter literally at arm’s length for most of my day was actually refreshing. I would check it maybe once a week from a Web browser, then every couple of weeks, then maybe once a month. As Twitter was also a way for friends to connect with me, I was sharing with them over direct messages, or DMs, my decision and my phone number and email if they didn’t already have it. I didn’t make a big deal publicly of my cutback on its usage though.
In between those checks, I really didn’t miss Twitter. I was still on LinkedIn and starting to experiment with Mastodon, an open source, federated (or shared) protocol of connecting individual social media instances together. I was also blogging more, going back to my “roots” of social media – look at my early posts, and I had many commenters, many more than I do today.
Over the weekend I happened to check Twitter and the only mention I had in the month since I last checked it was a tweet from a complete stranger asking me to DM him about a business opportunity. I paused for a moment, and said to myself this was it. It had been almost 18 months since I retreated, and I really didn’t miss it at all. Sure, the ol’ days were good – heck, even great – but today Twitter has lost its luster. Note that in what I have said so far I haven’t mentioned de-platforming, algorithms controlling what you see and don’t see, and the useless testifying of Twitter’s and other social and tech CEOs in front of Congress. Where these certainly played into my thinking (like not believing Twitter is a public square, rather a private space off of it) I had enough reasons to delete my account, and my proof is with the screenshot at the top of this message.
Will I return? I do have access to other Twitter accounts for organizations that I have helped manage, but personally I don’t see it. But never say never, and who knows what else is right around the corner.
Deconstructing Deleting Twitter
Social media was and continues to be a game-changer for how we communicate in the world, for better or for worse. The opposite of social media is not anti-social, rather I see it as returning to the roots of collaboration that the Internet is. My decision to quit Twitter was personal, but not entirely unique, as I have known others who have quit other social media platforms. Where everyone has their own reasons, there is a common thread of the negativity that is gnawing away at the good that social media enabled. It’s this good that I seek, whether on another platform or with a simple hello to someone, online or in-person.
This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.
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I applaud you deleting your Twitter account. It wasn’t serving a use for you, thus why have it around? Add on all the divisiveness on the platform, and I support not being part of that platform.
I still find Twitter enjoyable and engage a little bit on it. But it’s mostly me making tweets with replies to my tweets happening every now and then. It’s just so easy to use.
I might have commented about this on your blog before, since we both share this sentiment… it’s so much better to type out your thoughts in a blog post first, rather than in a tweet. That tiny little box in Twitter doesn’t give us the full room to keep typing. Yeah, you can make a thread to tell a longer story. But that’s only after you submit one 280 thought. Then you have to fill out another 280 character thought.
It’s like a piece of paper. If you try to write full thoughts on a 1.5” x 2” sticky note, you aren’t going to be writing as much. You could potentially fill up ten sticky notes. But man, then you have ten sticky notes that are loosely connected. Instead if you have a full sheet of paper, you can really flesh out your ideas more, and your brain has the room to feel free.
It’s kinda like fish in an aquarium. Put a fish in a three-gallon aquarium, and that fish will stay a small size. But put that fish inside a giant aquarium, then that fish will grow to a larger size.
I got a kick out of you looking back at the number of comments your blog used to get. I do the same thing. I love those days when a blog would be a conversation place. Alas, it’s so much easier for people to have that conversation on Facebook.
Twitter never really became a conversation place because of that tiny reply box. Sticky note after sticky note. You can’t really have a full conversation on sticky notes.
Oh, I had another point in my head about Twitter. Excuse me while I indulge on this topic even though you are no longer on Twitter. But this will speak to how Twitter doesn’t really work well—which is in the vein of what you were originally saying. I wish people would start using Tweetdeck. Two great things about Tweetdeck:
1. Tweetdeck does not use the algorithm to sort tweets in the stream. You don’t have this mishmash of stuff in your timeline. You have every single tweet sorted chronologically. Ahhh, so refreshing.
2. Tweetdeck lets you use lists. You don’t have to read the tweets of the accounts that tweet a ton. Instead you can have a list of just the people you really want to read from. I have a list of people whose every tweet I read. Really. I don’t miss any of them. They are from people I’m close with (and who don’t tweet a lot).
3. Tweetdeck lets you cut out retweets. I want original thoughts from real people. I don’t want all this echo chamber stuff. Retweets COULD be good. But often it’s just a mishmash of repeated things. I want to hear people’s words.
So that’s my indulgence on rambling on Tweetdeck. Let me return back to a point about Twitter that falls in line a bit with why you left. The like and fav buttons. Man. I should be happy when I got a like. But often that “like” is just an acknowledgement of “I read your response.” Which is nice. Ok, they saw it. But in effect since the person is not responding, the “like” button becomes a conversation ender. It says, “I am not continuing this conversation. Like.”
Facebook’s like isn’t a conversation ENDER. Instead it’s simply a conversation avoider. Just hit the like button on a post, so you don’t have to say anything. Twitter, of course, works that way too. But Facebook is the group conversation. Twitter is the one-to-one conversation. So the like on Twitter functions a bit different.
In either way, those services with their easy like buttons just destroy any sort of feedback.
But with blogs, we have comments. And comments that can be really long, like this one. :)
Comment by
Matt Maldre
on 11/11/21 at 12:57 PM
@Matt - Your post is long but welcome, and I am glad you made a post out it on your own blog!
Good to know about tweetdeck - I used it years ago, but that was when I was consulting on social media back in the day. The algos also impact what people see (or don’t) of what I post, and I never liked that either.
Now let me read Blair Kamin’s mention of you!
mp/m
Comment by
Mike Maddaloni
on 11/11/21 at 02:48 PM
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