After Twitter: rethinking my social-media use

Will Elon's Twitter succeed or fail? Regardless of the outcome, things will not be the same. Here is what I intend to do about it.

I used to love the conversations that were sparked from Twitter. Originally, I was in it to speak with other makers and techies, in the overlap between those who wanted to build tech businesses, and those who were just in it for the technology.

Over the years, this quality of Twitter got lost. It became noisier. I was also guilty of spreading myself too thin, talking about everything and nothing, to the point where the people who still followed me, were made up of fractured silos of people with widely different interests. If I spoke about one thing, I likely turned off half of the people who followed. Twitter got noisier, and so did my Twitter bubble because there wasn’t a common thread any more, just a ball of yarn.

A secondary factor is that Twitter has become a time-thief. It picks away at your attention, several times a day. It gives you micro-fragments of sometimes useful, sometimes nonsense, but net-net, it is a loss of focus, that rarely sparks the conversations that used to make it worthwhile.

Furthermore, I’m not convinced, based on the early days, that Twitter will even survive as an ongoing concern. Elon Musk has alienated advertisers crucial to Twitters survival, indiscriminately laid off people before understanding which people are crucial for ongoing operations, and quite likely made it difficult for Twitter to attract quality people in the future in doing so. Saddled with debt, cratering revenue and no one who knows how to steer the ship, Twitter may not survive.

For both practical and personal reasons, this may be the time to leave Twitter as a platform.

So what is my plan?

Since social-media overall is a net-negative in my life, and that of many others, I will retreat. I will reduce my Twitter use, to the point where it becomes nothing. I will instead focus on sharing my thoughts in slightly more long form.

This will likely take place across a few forums: quite a bit here on Substack. Some of it on the blog of my company, Chaordic, when the content fits there. When tech content fits there, I will cross-post links to it here, since there is considerable overlap.

I will continue to use my LinkedIn for shorter thoughts.

What about conversations?

I still want those too, but Twitter has become unfit for purpose for this. Comments will be enabled here, and on LinkedIn as well. And I obviously interact with people across a range of forums, but this landscape is becoming more fractured and single-purpose: there are several Slacks, Discords, obviously LinkedIn, Hackernews, Reddit and so on, that still facilitates conversations, and I don’t intend to leave them.

Overall, though, my goals are clear:

• Reduce noise and distraction.

• Think publicly in longer form (will make it available here, so do feel free to subscribe)

• Engage in deeper conversations on single-purpose/subject platforms across my areas of interest.

Are you sticking with Twitter? What will you do if Twitter no longer exists? Will you mourn, be thankful, or not even notice?