I joined Twitter in November 2008. I would have been 16 years old (about to turn 17), a junior in high school in rural Colorado. My first two tweets were about getting a Flickr account for some reason and then about resuming my vegetarianism (it didn’t keep).
I tweeted a lot in 2009, my first full year of Twitter, and it was mostly nonsense, high school drama, and me trying to get the attention of my favorite YouTubers. I probably had 10 followers, all my friends and collaborators for this very blog back when other people submitted posts (anyone here still remember that??). It was a glorious, if extremely cringe period of my online life (she says, on the website she’s had since she was 13, where there still exist over 5 blog posts about my devotion to the Twilight series).
Some teenage Bri bangers:
My Twitter usage waned a bit towards the end of college, but I started again with a vengeance once I became a filmmaker. The barrier for entry to start new Twitter accounts was low enough to make it ideal when making a brand new web series account, plus with Tweetdeck I could write and schedule posts months in advance so I wasn’t beholden to posting in real time while I was busy at work or on set. This was a game changer for me for many reasons, and quickly set me apart from my web series peers just in sheer “ability to keep up” with promotion and other things Twitter had to offer.
Twitter is the reason two of my friends are engaged (because I met one of them via Twitter, who then saw a cute boy I cast in several indie projects, who then introduced herself to him directly, and the rest is history). Twitter is the reason I have most of my indie film community, period, and is 100% the reason I have the job I have now. Hell, the first ever article I wrote for Stareable was about how I used Twitter for professional development! My ability to navigate Twitter and connect with other creative people through it was a major selling point for over half the jobs on my resume.
And now, Twitter is a smoking crater. I’m not going to sit here and pretend like things were all golden and wonderful pre-Elon taking things over. They weren’t. Twitter moderation and ability to protect users from tirades of hate was famously terrible, the failure to ban Trump until the very last minute was a major contributor to the current terrible state of our “democracy,” and it was way too easy to weaponize Twitter’s features for bad faith users. Twitter has always been toxic, but at least it used to be kind of ours.
Now, because a billionaire wants attention, he’s broken it for all of us. Twitter Circles are no longer private, Neo-Nazi accounts have verified account status for the low low price of $8/month, prominent white supremacists accounts that had been banned previously have been invited back to the platform, 2 factor verification is toast unless you pay for it (seems safe), tweets from people you don’t follow are showing up on your “follower” feed, engagement is at an all time low, Substack links are banned, if you disapprove of Elon Musk publicly he retaliates like the spoiled baby that he is by hiding your content, and the site is just kind of generally un-useable.
I feel like I’ve been mourning Twitter for months, and though Substack Notes, Post.News, Mastadon, and even Tumblr have presented themselves as potential landing spots for Twitter expats, none are quite right (here’s a good thread by my favorite internet writer that walks through why this is). For one thing, there hasn’t been mass adoption of any, which was kind of the major selling point for Twitter, right? The benefit was that I really only had to be on one platform for most of what I needed: irreverent nonsense, comedy, breaking news, creative networking, keeping up with friends. Twitter at its best felt alive like no other platform on the internet.
For another, most platforms with mass adoption like Instagram or TikTok are image or video centric. What made Twitter ideal for me and people like me was that it was word-centric. Sure, you could include images and videos, but all you really needed was your words. I was creating content for Twitter, sure, but I’m a writer, so it was as easy as breathing. I don’t want to have to include graphics or god forbid edit a video from my cell phone in order to do a little post about how I’m sad that the third book of a series came in from my Library app before the first two. Sometimes I just wanna share a little thought, and also see that a celebrity has died, and also watch two digital media journalists debate memes, without also having to have headphones in. Sometimes, I just want the words.
Other things I loved about Twitter that are becoming more and more rare in the current digital hellscape:
- Chronological feed
- Chronological feed, again, for the love of god just show me content from accounts I have opted-in to follow in the order in which they were posted
- Post character limit, forcing you to refine your thoughts down to their most concise version (kinda like Quiplash but all the time and not just to tell the best dick joke in under 60 seconds)
- The ability to easily schedule content
- The ability to type with my laptop to engage and post (why oh why do all these platforms focus solely on the app experience? Why else did I buy this insanely expensive laptop and learn to touch type so quickly if not to talk about the delicious quiche I’m eating and also post my anger about yet another school shooting onto an app with a bird logo???)
I don’t know where my new primary online space will be, professionally and otherwise, and it genuinely makes me sad that nearly two decades of curating my Twitter experience and cultivating friendships there is coming to an end. I am reluctantly a regular user of Instagram, I love Tumblr but mostly not for creating my own content, and of course you can find me every Friday recommending three new romance novels over on my new newsletter Forced Proximity.
In the meantime, I guess the point of this blog is to tell Elon Musk to go fuck himself, for destroying a place that mattered to a lot of people for his own vanity, and also for all the other stuff he’s an asshole about. If you’re curious, the below video is a great place to start!
Oh, and if you’re curious why I didn’t mention Facebook at any point in this blog… really? Maybe just, like, sit with that curiosity for a bit and see if you can’t work it out yourself.
