Housekeeping: this Substack now has a paid option! What does that mean? Very little, for now. I’m still figuring it out. Nothing is paywalled…though I may have future Q & A posts that are. Or we can start a Discord! A supper club! A friendship bracelet mailing ring! (But seriously we won’t.)
At any rate: if the spirit moves you, go ahead and pay for these essays (real work goes into this thing, after all), but if not, please read and share enthusiastically anyway, because I just like writing.
Now. On to my Twitter eulogy.
A thing that happens when you work at NPR: you’re at a party or at church or anywhere you meet new people. They ask about your work.
Upon finding out you report for NPR, they ask: “Oh! What’s your name? Maybe I’ll recognize you!,” presumably hoping that you are Steve Inskeep or Nina Totenberg or Lakshmi Singh.
You give your name. You are neither Steve Inskeep nor Nina Totenberg nor Lakshmi Singh. The questioner tips their head back. Intake of breath, mouth open. Pause.
“Aaahhhh…” they say, and now they are apologetic. “Well, maybe I don’t listen as much as I should!”
And you assure them that all is well, because of course, it is.
Except…….well, okay, then this exchange happens a dozen times, then a few dozen. And you start to wonder, “Am I doing enough stories? Are my stories impactful enough? Should people know my name?”
If you, reader, think this sounds insufferable, all woe-is-me, I demand more praise, you are correct. And in that case, boy oh boy are you going to be more annoyed by what’s coming.
Because a thing started happening to me a few years ago: I’d be at a party or church or anywhere I’d meet new people. And upon finding out I worked at NPR, they’d ask my name. And every so often, I’d get a new response:
“Oh! You’re funny on Twitter!”
I am ashamed to admit that this felt great.
—
This is my eulogy for Twitter. Because in case it wasn’t clear: I loved Twitter. I loved reading jokes, writing jokes, trying out new ideas that would eventually become news stories, making friends, gossiping with other journalists in my DMs, second-screening during Oscars or presidential debates or really any major televised event. I loved it.
That’s loveD – past-tense. Today, almost a year into the Elon Musk era, the site is glitchy, filled with spam, and harder to use in all sorts of ways.
Sometimes the site takes a while to load – showing me a list not of tweets, but rather of blue progress wheels. Finding news is harder – if I wanted to see updates last week about, say, Hurricane Idalia, I couldn’t search or visually scan for what reporters on the ground are saying, because verification is also gone. Furthermore, the news site I would be most likely to read and retweet (NPR, of course) has (understandably) left the platform.
There’s more. My tweets now regularly get pornbot replies – tweets from boobly avatars saying things like “wanna play?” accompanied by blurry photos that, apparently, I can gawk at if I click. Every time I block one pornbot, another account or three hurls new porns at me. And either way, pornbots (not to mention creeps and threatening assholes) are about to get a boost, as blocking is also apparently going away.
This altogether shittier user experience has led many people to leave the platform, or simply to use it far less. As a result, DMing someone means a much lower likelihood of getting a response, meaning the fun of chatting with fellow journos, sources, or even the occasional listener is gone. Texting a funny tweet to my husband (who quit almost a year ago) or my Twitter-exile friends is also … well, I still don’t get whether this works. Sometimes, my husband reports, he can see tweets. Sometimes he can’t. The logic of how Twitter works for non-Twitter-users is wholly unclear.
I have experienced this decline particularly starkly. I write this at the end of a six-month maternity leave, during which I have managed to tweet very little (for me). And so, as I now start to log on regularly again, I am acutely aware of just how much less enjoyable the platform is.
But I haven’t quit. Not yet. And that’s for two big reasons. The first is because I just can’t let go of how much I enjoyed the platform at its best.
I’m not talking here about Twitter at its revolutionary best – a place where major social movements gathered steam (the Arab Spring, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter). Yes, that demands attention, but let’s be real: something else kept us there day to day.
For me, it was the experience of Twitter as the school lunchroom – a big common space where we all sat with our people. It wasn’t exactly lawless, but it was informal – the place we hung out in between the serious business of our daily lives, talking to each other the way we didn’t talk to authority figures.
Like any lunchroom, there were cliques. Everyone had the table they sat at, or at least huddled around – journalists’ Twitter, Black Twitter, book Twitter, econ Twitter, left-wing-activist Twitter, alt-right Twitter, Weird Twitter, feminist twitter. You could flit between tables, of course, but you had the crew(s) you knew best – the people you trusted, or at least wanted to hear from.
But despite the self-segregation, everyone in the lunchroom still had a shared experience. Every so often, everyone would crowd around a screen to watch the same incredible or idiotic video – did you SEE this little kid play the drums? I’m sorry – Don Lemon said WHAT now? A joke would start circulating at one table, and soon everyone was riffing on 30 to 50 feral hogs or Jeans and Jorts or Ruthkanda. It was simply fun.
One day, Donald Trump stood up on a table and started yelling louder and louder. Other people started amplifying it. Sometimes a teacher told you to write a paper on what he was yelling about. (NOTE: For a while in 2017, I headed up NPR’s Trump-tweet-fact-checking project. Try as I may, I cannot find it on Google, but it exists, and it was an obnoxious amount of work.) Trump’s presence most definitely changed the dynamic of the lunchroom, but you had a choice. If you wanted to pay attention, you could. If not, you could carry on.
The lunchroom wasn’t entirely joyful, of course. Every so often a bully would sidle up and breathe a vile threat in your ear. A pack of five or six guys would follow you around, responding to everything you said, so faithfully that it started to feel unsettling. After you got something wrong in class that morning, someone would walk by and yell “HOLY SHIT did you see how bad Kurtzleben fucked up? Now let’s all point at her and scream!” Someone would say something dimwitted and rightfully get shouted down or even booted out…and meanwhile, some people wandered around spoiling for a fight, looking for reasons to shout down or boot out others.
Meanwhile, particularly at the journalists’ table, every five minutes, someone would stand up and announce an award they had won and everyone would applaud and you’d wonder if you were inadequate. Furthermore, a bunch of hall monitor types occasionally stood up to wag their fingers at everyone else at the table, intoning that the lunchroom isn’t real life, you know – in the real world, people don’t eat lunch all day long, so maybe you, too, should spend less time in the lunchroom.
But then again…in general, it was a good time.
Until.
Until one day the richest kid at school wandered in and lobbed a stinkbomb and screamed, “okay, this is MY LUNCHROOM NOW” and he and his friends got rid of what little order and rule-having there had been. As a result, everyone who didn’t like the rich kid’s regime decided they wanted to leave. Except most of us didn’t quite leave, because no one could agree on a new common space to hang out in – the library? The playground? The parking lot? So now a lot of us still tiptoe in and out of the now-much-emptier lunchroom every so often, checking to see how stinky it still is, and while we agree that yes it smells pretty bad, there’s no place left to go to socialize that’s at all as good as the lunchroom was at its best, and anyway, enough of us are still around the lunchroom that, I dunno, maybe it could get better? Somehow?
Sad, maybe, but it’s the truth.
There is measurable evidence that Twitter has grown quieter, and maybe that it will grow still more deserted.
A poll from the Pew Research Center:
Six-in-ten U.S. adults who have used Twitter in the past year say they have taken a break from the platform recently. And a quarter of these users say they are not likely to use Twitter a year from now, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.
The Center’s new analysis of actual behavior on the site finds that the most active users before Musk’s acquisition – defined as the top 20% by tweet volume – have seen a noticeable posting decline in the months after. These users’ average number of tweets per month declined by around 25% following the acquisition.
—
Twenty-five percent fewer tweets from the super-tweeters! That’s a lot, and it genuinely makes me sad.
And I fully understand that my view of this is colored by the fact that I’m a journalist…I’m curious how people in other industries feel about the site falling apart.
Another anecdote: I was at a wedding recently, and the topic at my table turned to Twitter.
A friend proclaimed dismissively: “Twitter is just a place for journalists to talk to each other.”
And…he wasn’t wrong, but also, it’s not JUST that.
—
Another poll:
97% of journalists on Twitter mostly use/used Twitter to promote their stories
95% realized that even at its height, Twitter got you very little in terms of traffic volume. (Want actual clicks? That’s what Facebook and clickbaity headlines are for.)
90% therefore put their stories up yes for the dozen additional clicks, but really, they knew they were looking for reactions – both praise from the right people and hate from the worst people, both of which would reinforce that you, friend, were doing Good Work™.
73% used it as a thing to poke at and avoid socializing while waiting around for press conferences and other events to start.
60% used it to post pet photos.
(NOTE: This is not a real poll. I made this poll up.)
48% used it to live-tweet events.
42% used it to start live-tweeting events, only to question, one or two tweets in, what the point of live-tweeting was. They would then lose interest and abruptly stop live-tweeting the event, while taking note that no one else seemed to notice, much less care, that their live-tweeting had been deeply subpar.
31% used it to toe riiiight up to the line of voicing an opinion, giving themselves a brief, sweet rush and release, even while knowing they were courting emails (Subject line: “Your tweet”) from their workplaces’ standards departments.
26% tweeted at least once a week that Twitter is a “hellsite.” Of those, 100% were (and are) among Twitter’s most active users.
5% used it to subtweet colleagues who annoyed them.
(NOTE: Me? Noooo…)
100% used it for brand-building.
42% would admit to doing such a thing.
3% would admit to enjoying such a thing.
(NOTE: Still making this up.)
—-
It feels embarrassing to admit that I deeply enjoyed “cultivating my brand” on Twitter. But I did. This is the other reason I’ll miss Old Twitter.
Let’s get back to the NPR anecdote I started with. You could read that and dismiss my love of old-Twitter as a crutch, a coping mechanism for past professional problems – struggling to get on the air at your news organization? To fit in in a newsroom? To even be a rookie reporter? Tweet something funny. Get some engagement. Spike your dopamine.
But that would be too dismissive an explanation. Twitter has been genuinely empowering for a lot of journalists (and people in a lot of other industries, for that matter). It was a place to be independent – to, at the very least, thumb your nose at the perceived stuffiness of a snooty, self-righteous fourth-estate, for example. Or to talk about pet subjects and theories that don’t merit a full news story yet…or to try out topics and theories you hope to turn into a story.
I personally used it to create a niche for myself, by tweeting about the (constant, pervasive, so-ever-present-it’s-invisible-to-most-people) way that masculinity is embedded in American politics. In an environment where day-to-day news takes up so much time, I often simply haven’t had time to follow this thread…a series I had planned on the topic last year, for example, disappeared when the Dobbs ruling happened, and I instead covered abortion politics for much of the year.
This means I’ve kept up on masculinity politics by tweeting about it, and also by people tweeting at me about it. When I do get time to cover it, you can bet that I’ll be searching my replies and notifications for all of those past instances of candidates doing pushups or challenging each other to fights or preening in any other number of cringey ways.
More than all of this, Twitter was a place where people of all types publicly called out their employers when necessary – for their management practices, for being sexist, racist, classist, all kinds of -ist. It was a place to critique how the news was covered, to point to overtly horse-racey coverage of genuinely important policy discussions and declare, “Hey. I see that, and that sucks.”
Did this directly improve the news? I like to think it did. I know when I got called out for doing a subpar story, I took it to heart (perhaps too much). And when I pointed out how we reporters could do better, I do believe that improved the trust that at least some of our listeners/readers had for me and, hopefully, for my organization as a whole.
And even if you don’t buy that argument, that journalists doing brand-building on Twitter improved the news – or even if you flat-out hate that idea – the Personal Brand is most definitely still shaping news. News organizations are growing their reliance on newsletters, for example, where the reporter’s voices and identities are more important. The idea is to put recognizable names in your inbox every morning/week/etc. And personal branding moves people — it was a big factor in moving Taylor Lorenz from the New York Times to the Washington Post.
This brings me back to the wedding. When my friend accused Twitter of being playtime for journalists, then asked me what I’d do now, I responded in a way I’m not proud of:
“I…guess I’ll just have to actually be good at my job now!”
This was bullshit self-deprecation on my part. I am very good at my job.
But also: what I was really saying was that I have to differentiate myself some other way now. A lot of us do.
One possible result is that a lot more of us journalists make personal newsletters. (By the way: welcome, hello, hi, very very glad you’re here.)
I also genuinely think this could affect particular job markets — how people in Twitter-centric industries (journalism, policy, academia, publishing) move around, given how much networking has taken place on Twitter. DMs are where you go to ask so-and-so about that job that’s open, what it’s like to work in this newsroom vs. that, and so on.
My hope is that the individualism so many of us journalists found on Twitter finds a way to come out in our work — whether that’s via humor, flat-out weirdness, or [gasp] more-apparent points of view.
But really, the most likely scenario seems to be inertia — the site will probably just continue to putter out slowly, losing popularity as people stop wandering in. I, personally, will keep visiting the lunchroom…either until it becomes intolerable to hang out in…or, I guess, until there’s no one there to hang out with.
LINKS/RECOMMENDATIONS
Podcast rec: The Allusionist — Shout-out to my dear friend Rachel for pointing me toward this pod. Listen in particular to the Uranus episode, a monumental achievement in combining the cerebral (the etymological origins of “Uranus”) and the juvenile (it’s about Uranus).
Strawberry pretzel pie — I have made this twice this summer. Either I haven’t perfected the pretzel crust, or it just naturally has awful structural integrity…but that won’t matter when your face is buried ears-deep in this pie, which is outstanding. Make it now while strawberries are still kind of good.
Bad Summer People — A fun beachy read about the awful rich people who inhabit a town on Fire Island for the summer. I plowed through it. (Honorable mention: Pineapple Street, which was also an enjoyable eat-the-rich read for the most part, but whose class politics grew mushy and unintelligible by the end. Ultimately reads like an updated Jane Austen, and I’m not sure how much I mean that as a compliment.)
Years ago a client in (yikes) Titonka, IA told me I'd find the town by skimming the MN border, turning sharply right, and stopping just on the edge of hell. I stole that description to use for my home (a couple of counties over)in NW IA. My husband and I feel alone here in what my neighbors believe is the actual God's Country. Twitter was a lovely island getaway, a daily mini- vacation to the land of ideas and clever rejoinders. Miss it. Miss you. Will gladly support your sustack offering.
Oof. I feel this in my bones. As a former reporter and software developer (another profession that thrives on "Have you seen this new thing?") , Real Twitter was the water cooler at which I could keep up with my colleagues' lives and learn about things that wouldn't normally cross my desk on a given day. I've missed you and many other journalists since I "kinda left" and then left for good earlier this year (and I'm still trying to pretend that Mastodon is just as good), but it will certainly be missed.