Twitter’s Dead, And That Sucks

Audio Version

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Elon Musk, in his infinite wealth I mean wisdom, has decided that non-paying Twitter users are only allowed to view 600 tweets per day. Hell, even paying Twitter users can only see 6000 tweets per day, which is also not nearly enough. This effectively kills Twitter.

We’re supposed to say, good riddance! That solves that! That’s one less distraction for my day! Or some variance of these words. Because that’s sticking it to the man. Good! I didn’t want your stupid website anyway, billionaire! And maybe some people legitimately feel this way. But I don’t. Well, apart from directing ire at the idiot billionaire, that is.

I joined Twitter nearly fifteen years ago, at the age of 13, which means I’ve been using the site for over half of my life. And as an introvert, it’s become my favourite way to keep up with my friends and people I admire. People often talk about what a toxic cesspit Twitter is, but it turns out that if you unfollow news sites and brands and toxic people, mute a bunch of depressing words, and block any assholes you come across, you can – could – make that site a far more pleasant experience. For me, Twitter is not this toxic cesspit which I’m finally free from being chained to. It’s a social media feed full of people I like talking to each other about things we all like. It’s been one of my primary ways of socialising for a good while now.

So for some idiot billionaire to come and take that away for idiot billionaire reasons is actually quite a blow. I’m not going to pretend to celebrate. It sucks! I already feel cut off from people who’s thoughts I enjoy reading on a daily basis. There’s other platforms but the vibe is different with every single one. YouTube and Twitch are less of an open two-way channel. Instagram is less immediate, or thought-focused. Facebook is… Facebook. And there’s no unified Twitter alternative that we’ve all decided to migrate to without incident. Twitter is a legitimate form of communication that an idiot billionaire has just stamped all over, and its absence is going to affect the way I perceive the world moving forwards.

Hopefully this post ages like milk and the change is reverted. But let’s be real, unless he’s even dumber than we all thought, he’s killing Twitter on purpose at this point.

I’m Quitting Twitter! (Temporarily…)

That’s it! I’m doing it! I’m quitting Twitter!

…for a week, anyway. At least initially.

This may not sound like a big deal, but when you consider the fact that I’ve checked Twitter almost every single day since the 9th July 2008, the situation becomes a little more apparent. Add in the fact that that date was more than half my life ago – when I exactly thirteen years and one month old, to be exact – and suddenly it should sound reasonable to say I’m questioning the impact it’s had on my entire life.

The thing is, I’m not doing this in reaction to anything. I’ve “quit” Twitter a couple times before in some of my lowest, angriest moments, but I’ve always come crawling back the next day. And whilst it’s common to refer to Twitter as a cesspit of doom nowadays, I actually have a lot of positive opinions about it. There are cute animal photos and funny jokes. I enjoy using it to keep up with people I know and people I admire. It’s been a prominent source of education from viewpoints I may not have discovered in my personal life otherwise. It’s these things which make the decision to step away all that much more difficult.

But the concerns here are just as numerous. Checking Twitter has been an impulse for years of my life now. According to the usage data on my phone, I open Twitter between 50 to 65 times a day. I also spend about an hour a day looking at it, which isn’t so bad but could certainly be time spent doing something else, like enjoying a show or some comics or reading a book.

I think the biggest impact Twitter has had on my life these past 14 years has been in how I share thoughts and opinions. Without Twitter, how many passing thoughts would I have shared in a message to a friend instead of a tweet? Might my relationships be stronger for doing so? It’s even more concerning when you consider that a majority of my tweets don’t get a single interaction. I’m not a voice in a community, I’m literally just voicing my thoughts to myself in public. And while I have no qualms about doing so, I do have other platforms to do so in more creative ways.

I wonder… have you ever had that moment where your phone runs out of charge, and for the moment between plugging it in and it coming back online, you felt disconnected and alone? That’s probably not healthy, right? I wonder if that feeling is as universal as I thought. And I wonder if I’m going to feel that way when I stop using Twitter. I plan on using my reclaimed time in constructive ways; I’m sure I’ll feel lost at first, instinctually reaching toward that app or bookmark before remembering I’ve removed it, and should spend my time elsewise. But perhaps, in time, that instinct will fade away, replaced with a stronger presence in my day to day, or more frequent messages with friends.

I’ll probably write another post on this in a week, or if I do decide to wait longer, some later date. In the meantime, I’ll continue to talk about all the stuff I love talking about on my weekly YouTube series, in livestreams, and perhaps in more blog posts right here.

Big Mouth, Small Audience

Before starting this blog post, I’d like to remind my readers that this blog will soon be changing to the domain name kristianrichmond.wordpress.com. If you frequent this blog via bookmark or web address, be sure to adjust your navigation accordingly.

I have a feeling that this will break a multitude of links across my blog posts, where I refer to earlier blog posts. Please bear with me if this happens.

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I’ve been churning out all sorts of content on the internet for almost a decade now, from the honestly too-young age of 12 to the 21 year old creature that I am today. And whilst a decade might not seem like long for other age ranges, teenage years are extremely formative and developmental to who you ultimately become as a person, and therefore much of my growth as a person and as a creator has been documented across various stations of the internet throughout this half of my life. Many of these have been deleted, privatised, or otherwise locked away never to see the light of day again – much to the benefit of anyone who would stumble across the inane blatherings of my teenage self. Others still exist.

It all began with my Youtube channel back in 2007. Youtube was a very different place back then. Monetisation wasn’t really a thing, and the idea of a single Youtuber having a million subscribers was ludicrous. It was more of a hobby. And 12 year old me wanted in on that hobby. And so, with no video editing or creating experience, none of the necessary equipment to do so and being far too young to create anything watchable, I set out on my mission to become one of the popular Youtubers I aspired to and watched. The results looked a little like this feat of video-making ability. Oddly, this Youtube account amassed the largest audience I’ve ever received for my content, and whilst the videos obviously improved in quality over the next 5 years before I shut it down, it’s still something I find strange. I use the account nowadays to upload 30 second gaming clips for my own archiving purposes, and to share.

It didn’t stop there. I won’t bore you with a full account but my creative instincts caused me to branch out into contributing to short story and poetry websites and starting multiple blogs (none of which were as well maintained or frequently updated as this one). I also discovered social networks along with the rest of my generation and joined Facebook for my ‘real life’ contacts, and Twitter to create and voice my internet persona. Twitter is, I think, a keystone for the topic of this blog post.

I’ve been tweeting for nearly nine years now. According to my profile statistics, I’ve tweeted a grand total of 32,708 times, but for all of those tweets across all of those years, I’ve amassed only 200 followers. And as contradictory to the existence of this post it may seem, I’m perfectly fine with that. I value my followers. I’d probably still be tweeting if I had 10% of that number. And that, finally, is where the name of this blog post comes into play. The question I ask myself every six months or so. Am I just simply talking to myself? I have a low interaction point with my 200 followers. This blog has been updating almost weekly for a year now and it has little over a hundred (very much appreciated) readers. Blog statistics tell me that each blog post gets less than 10 visitors, and whilst I’m aware that many people read from their feed or their emails, I’d be lying if I said that this statistic, among others, wasn’t disheartening. It’s easy to interpret these as being signs pointing towards me being boring or unlikable, and on some days this is all too believable.

But enough whinging. Rationalism tells me that people like myself form the bulk of the internet’s content creating community. It may feel like there’s an abundance of successful people with large audiences, but that’s merely because you don’t hear about or see those with followers in the hundreds. And whilst part of me does wish for an audience to give my words and creations some gravity, a larger part of me acknowledges that most of what I do is out of either enjoyment, practice or ventilation. Even if I did feel defeated at the notion of talking to myself, I’ve proven to myself before that just giving up these outlets for discussion and creation causes me to slowly crumple inwardly, making for more moments of anguish and irrational upset than before. So hey, if nothing else, it’s therapeutic!

Just Call Me Mr. Twit

Whilst I often don’t give it a second thought, Twitter has been a daily part of my life for eight years now, having joined the site in July of 2008. That’s over a third of my life (I’m 21 and joined when I was 13), and in that time I’ve tweeted over 30,000 times. Whilst I’ve never had many followers (I’ve been sitting on and around 200 for the last few months), this has never really bothered me, as I view the platform more as a microblog to post opinions, jokes, and reactionary content, shared mainly among a select few friends. But after over eight years of using the service, it’s crazy to think of just how much of my life is reflected through my profile.

Seeing as it’s possible to download your entire Twitter archive nowadays, I took it upon myself to download it and have a gander at my tweeting history. My first tweet, for the record, was on the 9th of July 2008, and it reads, “Hi i just started Twitter its pretty cool.” Pretty solid first tweet, I think, and the punctuation issues are pretty tame compared to later teenage tweets. See, the way I see it, my Twitter history can be broken up into four eras:

Obnoxious Teen

I’ll say that this era runs roughly from 2008 to 2009. It contains gems such as “W00T! GO OBAMA! WOO WOO WOO! FTW!”, “anyone online plz message me”, and my personal favourite, “im feeling random. pickles nad onions are good for hyour rabbit munching jewels.” It’s somewhat alarming to me that these are the foundations upon which my Twitter account is built.

Sixteen Year Old Superhero

Around 2010 – 2011, I began to develop what I believed to be the concrete foundations of my philosophical beliefs. This mainly entailed pacifism and world peace, and whilst these are still ideals that I believe in, I’m nowhere near as unshakeable in my beliefs as I was back then. Part of me honestly believed that through my writing, I’d be able to convince everybody that hatred was a bad thing and that there was no need for violence, anywhere, ever again. Tweets such as “Today is such a beautiful day :)” were commonplace, as well as out-of-context song lyrics to convey some sort of deep emotional tone to those reading my timeline (e.g “Let’s waste time, chasing cars…”). In fact, if I found myself making the tweet, “Seeing as I’ve been so depressed as of late, I’m making a “Sad Songs” playlist on Youtube. Feel free to take a gander when I make it public”, I’d probably have to give myself a good old slap in the face. But this directly leads into my next ‘era’.

Oversharing Whingebag

Starting around 2012 and ending in 2013, I went through a dark time in my life. And that’s okay, I’m not here to criticise myself for unavoidable emotions. I am here, however, to criticise the dreadful amounts of oversharing that took place on my Twitter account during that time. I’d always been a bit of an oversharing person on my account, but it escalated to entirely new levels. Mopey, out-of-context tweets like “I dread to think how I’ll feel when I’m out of distractions…” were not just common but rampant, and I pretty much spent the entire time walking around crying ‘woe is me’.

I can safely say that early in 2013, I began feeling much better, and this was reflected in more humorous tweets such as, “Strumming my cat like a guitar” / “She seems to enjoy this situation so I think I’ll stop” / “Weird cat, what the hell is wrong with you” / “You’re not a guitar, cat.”

Now

I’m a firm believer that you can’t define an era of time whilst you’re still inside it. It’s like zooming out from a big picture. The only description I can really give my modern-day Twitter account is baseless comedy, some gaming talk and a bit of nihilistic meming thrown in there for future self-loathing sessions. I’ve also used Twitter as more of an interactive means of contacting and laughing with friends, since I met more people at uni who use the service. I’ve put a conscious stop to the oversharing (which was a difficult habit to break at first) and whilst I do spout a lot of unrelated and often profane crap, I like to think that I’m worth a follow. I certainly keep myself amused, at any rate.

In the last few years I’ve also become an avid WoW player, so much so that I made a separate Twitter account for it so that I don’t flood my current account with content that the vast majority of my followers won’t understand or be interested in.