On contemplating quitting Twitter
Here is Matt Glassman considering quitting Twitter and Bluesky. I'm on Twitter a whole lot less than I used to be.
First:
- I still call it "Twitter." Force of habit, and I like the old name better.
- I am as always speaking only for myself.
A few miscellaneous notes:
- The excellent Alex Komoroske maintains a "Bits and Bobs" Google doc; this is a roughly time-ordered series of Tweet-length observations, in outline structure. This strikes me as a great alternative to putting short-form material on any social media platform. (One of my main use cases for such platforms is that I sometimes want to say publicly, but would feel silly making a blog posts for, things like "Why don't college soccer teams bring their keepers up when they're taking corner kicks with seven seconds left?")
- Patrick McKenzie still posts things that (i) are useful and (ii) I can't (to my knowledge) get elsewhere. He's not the only one.
- As Matt notes, Twitter is worse as a way to reach people, and much worse as a way to reach people whom I wouldn't otherwise reach and want to reach.
- I still hear a lot more "I'm happy I quit [some] social media" than "I quit [some] social media but am not sure that was the right decision."
- One big reason I stay away from social media is that I watch Jeopardy! on Hulu, which means that I get the episodes a day late, and I don't want spoilers. If you have certain strong, idiosyncratic preferences, this is a great way to cut back.
- My written environment is so dense with LLM-generated prose that Twitter doesn't feel all that artificial or sloppy by comparison. (And that's sad.)
So: I am there rarely, but not never. And I heartily support a movement to maintain "bits and bobs"-style documents.