The date seemed novel at the time. Having experienced a growing sense of detachment from the website, I chose December 13, 2024, to be my last evening on Twitter. Symbolically, it was Friday the 13th, a cursed holiday known more for misery. People have built hotels without a 13th floor because of cultural superstitions. The website held me for well over a decade, attaching me to what little remained of my early 20s and a world that felt open to discovery. Nothing would help me remember this morbid date better than a gimmick.
For most people, the day you submit your resignation to a website is uneventful. There’s no reason to revisit it with any greater sense of introspection. However, I view my life as a series of chapters with overarching themes and development. There has to be something that’s changed in the year since I walked away and found a new home on various other websites, notably Bluesky, in hopes of rebuilding my career with a new and more engaging audience.
So, how’s that going for ya?
Any attempt to give this a proper answer would be difficult. The multi-pronged reasoning has as much to do with me as it does things that are evident to people with a passing knowledge of modern digital management. The big, bold, underlined seven times with a dozen exclamation points reason for leaving is that the owner, Elon Musk, has become an increasingly disagreeable figure. At the time of December 2024, he was assigned to work for the upcoming presidential administration in a role called “Department of Government Efficiency.” I saw the writing on the wall and feared that his infiltration of the U.S. government would result in Twitter becoming an outlet for right-wing propaganda, of which any attempt to fight against would cause you to drown under hundreds of bots and bigots.
Beyond politics, Twitter had lost its soul. Without giving inanimate objects too much credit, an average evening would go from intrigue to further burnout and disappointment. Yes, there were people worth talking to, but the notifications bar went from having “real” responses to having a dozen bots with the same name liking posts, and not even posts that were sensible. I’d write personal threads about my life, and “Tanya” would like the one that needed the most preceding context. Even when they were lying to me, there wasn’t enough validity to the illusion. It put into question whether the view counts were accurate, or if I was talking to a bunch of nothing as my timeline refreshed to show me the same dozen posts for three hours on end. Not only that, but people who updated regularly would escape for days without comprehension.
During 2020, I used the internet as escapism. I famously wrote and published something every day between March and November of that year (average count: 1,500 to 2,000 words). It was only in hindsight that I realized it was an exhausting coping mechanism that kept me from thinking too deeply about the ongoing pandemic, and by that December, I was forming a dissociative state every time I was online. Paranoia struck me. There’s a lot of psychology that goes along with that, but it took years of stepping away and engaging with the real world to begin assessing social media through a more rational lens.
Because of that time, something is triggering about giving yourself over to computers willingly. I recognize the impulsivity, and I have fallen victim to it now and then, but our inability to collectively fight against the problem and assess the post-pandemic social isolation epidemic explains why the world feels so tortured and irrational. Even as I’ve worked to have a healthy relationship with social media, I’ve noticed that many with more power and purpose than myself to be there have only gotten worse, and it’s been a motivation to realize I’ve made the right decision.
Nowhere is that clearer than in my complicated opinions on Elon Musk. I am less concerned with the man’s well-being than with what he symbolizes as one of the world’s wealthiest men. The old adage, “Money can’t buy you happiness,” has been his tragic irony, especially in the case of Twitter. Here, he’s able to build his own personal utopia where everything works as he’d like, and instead it’s been a nonstop mess with some of the most transparent leadership issues in modern history. To hear about Musk’s time on Twitter is to hear about a man desperate to receive validation for fleeting causes, where he’d rather turn a meme into a government-dismantling organization than think of any way to better his larger reputation. To analyze his behavior makes me believe that he’s an inherently lonely man, and if someone with that power can’t be satisfied, then what chance do I have? At least my family talks to me.
It’s easy to assess everything that’s happened since as an even more valid reason for jumping ship. DOGE left hundreds of thousands unemployed before dismantling itself. Within hours of the administration’s debut, Musk would sport fascistic salutes while people belittled the grown-ass adult by infantilizing it as some response to his autism (of which said administration is trying to inexplicably eradicate, but go off, I guess). He wielded chainsaws and hired teenagers nicknamed Big Balls. He was not a man with a plan, or at least one sensible to a sustainable government. I choose to not look into his other endeavors, but there’s a reason that people saw an image from January 1, 2025, of a Cybertruck in flames and thought it was the perfect symbol for the year to come.
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| Subtle |
Which is all to say that even as I moved beyond Twitter, there was no escaping the news. It was already in a terrible state, but absence filled me with relief, knowing I no longer had to be in that toxic cycle of bots fighting for attention alongside the most cynical perspectives. There were still good people there, who long ago disappeared and left me missing their voices, but I couldn’t survive in a world where Musk was promoting Grok, which in itself has become a meme on Bluesky for spouting some truly heinous and conspiratorial viewpoints. Gone were the days of watching celebrities clumsily share their lives with a level of transparency that ranged from innocent to character assassination. Now the threat of impulsive decisions from power-hungry politicians could alter our diplomatic future. No thanks.
Maybe the hardest part of transitioning away from Twitter has been noticing that the era of social media feeling “fun” no longer exists. I’m sure it does for younger generations, but the aspects I reveled in don’t speak to people in the back half of their 30s. There is this self-consciousness that entered the fold around 2016, where suddenly everything you posted became scrutinized. That isn’t to say that certain topics aren't still there to engage with, but they feel sidelined by a need to share political opinion, where A.I. memes have replaced others’ organic thought, and I’m left in a different dissociative state of artifice. As someone suggested recently, it might be a byproduct of the 2000s internet being more “wild west,” where it was less commodified, and people were there out of curiosity. There was more celebration of differences, even if it still had the familiar divisions. Now, even the people who think they’re being clever by posting grotesque memes of the president are a boring fad that’s almost a decade old.
For those who follow sports, you can see a microcosm of mob mentality in real time, where jokes emerge, and people bond over the competitive one-upmanship. I suppose the difference with the internet is that more people are shuffling through the turnstiles, and so everyone’s perspectives are fighting for that career-defining comment. Virality replaces deeper thought, and it saddens me to think that there’s no plausible path back to collective nuance. Everyone is chasing that 15 seconds of fame, which provides a fleeting dopamine rush before forcing you to sit with the emptiness. There’s often no long-term gain, so most internet culture lacks any permanence. Despite my compliance, I’d argue there’s tragedy in scrolling endless content that never forms a long-term memory.
Twitter was terrible at that. Bluesky is, thankfully, a little better about creating something closer to an ideal experience. While I have been critical of larger conceptual social media, I still get value out of engaging with people who use it for genuine curiosity. These aren’t necessarily people who make viral content or need to bump up follower counts (though Bluesky’s hindrance comes from something similar). Everyone is there just having fun. Sure, Bluesky was made by the guy who could’ve easily used his millions to retool Twitter into something better, but the reset at least feels like he took away the right lessons. It’s not a complete fix, but I have been more satisfied with my experience.
Something jarring about Bluesky is how little time is spent in an anxious state. Twitter felt like a constant reminder of its shortcomings, where little was done to make the user experience welcoming. With Bluesky, there was an organized simplicity to the structure that allowed you to engage with smaller pockets of the website. You could follow artists, politicians, historians, or any subset you want to imagine. There’s something convenient about the structure that remains enviable. The only issue, of course, is finding a basis for a friend group if you don’t know one or two people. Also, without any attachment during the formative years of socializing, the whole thing can’t help but feel insignificant from the jump.
Looking through Reddit, you will quickly learn how many people are frustrated by Bluesky’s design. There’s a need to follow as many people as you can so that you can pop up in others’ mutual recommendations. This helps balloon the material you see, but it also means you often end up following a ton of people you never interact with. It’s an issue I’ve long faced, but it’s difficult to get a conversation started that’s on par with Twitter’s best days, where you were spontaneously engaging with like-minded individuals and sometimes were ambushed by random celebrity encounters. There was joy to Twitter’s original spontaneity that is missing on Bluesky, and while it’s helped keep the toxic element out, it’s harder to feel as riveted.
This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. I’ve experienced some fun exchanges, notably with Neil Diamond fans. However, the effort to find a topic that receives feedback is difficult, especially when the friends you carried over from Twitter acknowledge their dissatisfaction with Bluesky’s platform and thus have all but abandoned regular exchange. This has been my one drive to want to restart Twitter, even if I have been happier in the year since. There’s been less inconsequential worry, which has allowed time to think about more personal endeavors. The downside is that I spend more time offline, but I appreciate a website that’s not working against you.
For the time being, I will continue to call Bluesky a good website. I wish it could be more, but I lack the passion to make anything more meaningful. As someone who has had addictive spurts with Twitter, I fear having that same relationship with any website again. Even so, the need to market myself remains key to my independent operation, and I have been trying to think of other websites that could satisfy my disappointment with the initial run on Bluesky. Part of that is, again, starting over. However, I feel like this is my least engaged year in a while… and I have to determine how much of that is just me not wanting to promote.
To start wrapping up, I think about the time on TikTok when I discovered that Myspace’s Tom Anderson was living a peaceful life. Here was a man who symbolized my high school years and presented a website full of freedom for self-creation. He had settled down and found happiness. As I look at Musk doing desperate acts for minutes of joy, I realize that some things have been lost as the internet has become more corporate. It has become more limited in wonder, and I’m starting to feel that. I’m not suggesting I’m on the verge of independence, but I’m finding that maybe having a life outside the computer is where I’d love the future to go. I’ll still watch YouTube videos every night and check in with my buddies on Bluesky, but I can’t be in the weeds dealing with conversations that are fleeting. I would love to find a website where I can satisfy a decent audience for my writing, but for now, I try to make friends who give me reason to write in the first place.
I’m not sure how the people making Spacehey are doing, but I hope that’s reviving some ideas for the next age of social media… even if I get the irony of a site geared at recreating my teenage years on Myspace that doesn’t appeal to enough of my current friend group, I hope it’s inspiring something to feel inventive and fresh again. There are only so many days you can spend staring at text and memes and feel satisfied.
And to all of my Twitter friends I’ve lost along the way, I hope life is treating you okay. I’m unsure if things have gotten better over there, but the press hasn’t been kind. In what may be a fitting send-off, my final conversation on there was about mental health and therapy. Even in the muck, there was an effort to better ourselves. If only more people took away that message, maybe things would be better. Then again, maybe it’ll take doing something like my old Myspace friend Tom and stepping away, or downsizing your online profile. I’m not ready to do that, but at least I’m currently in a better place with everything.
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