On Those Who Hate Twitter But Cannot Quit It

If you are reading something that I am writing, odds are this is about you

Twitter is a viper’s nest, a perpetual pissing match with millions of people marking their claim on the same stretch of dead grass. It is a black hole which draws all intelligence, curiosity, and spontaneity to their oblivion. To speak earnestly on Twitter is to invite mockery and a sudden outpouring of contempt from total strangers. Little wonder that so many loudly express their hatred for the platform. More mysterious is that this hatred seems to be most frequently expressed on Twitter itself, by people who show no indication that they will ever actually stop logging on.

How to account for this? Imagine, for a moment, a bar or a nightclub that is a hub for a particular local scene. Everyone who goes might agree that it is overcrowded, that it is full of obnoxious and repulsive characters, and is simply unpleasant in too many ways to list. They may even convince themselves, upon leaving, that they will not be coming back. But like promises to never drink again on the morning of a hangover, these convictions are paper thin. People keep going back, because it is, in an important sense that defies reason or description, the place to be.

Twitter is the place to be, and we addicts who cannot quit it know this. We hate its vices all the more because we know it. I have made more friends through Twitter than any other place, physical or digital. Beyond this close circle of friendship are those looser ties with people who I gain much from, through the simple joy of conversation. And the audience I have built, however modest, around myself and around Liberal Currents, I owe to Twitter more than any other scene.

Of course, the ceaseless, gnawing hunger for an audience is part of what makes Twitter so terrible. The easiest way to get attention when you do not have many followers yourself is to reply to someone who does. Even agreement is obnoxious when it is a constant, buzzing thing. But antagonism is more likely than agreement, for antagonism draws a more energetic response, from the one replied to or their followers. And of course, the quote-tweet putting a hostile frame on the quoted tweet is one of the most common paths to that promised land, going viral.

Twitter’s specific mechanics certainly bear a great deal of blame for this state of affairs, and its caretakers have by and large only made matters worse with each update. Its scale, especially the scale of its shared public space, is another problem.

But by and large the problem is that it is a scene full of people and people can be attention-seeking, unkind, and self-absorbed prats. Daily I hear about the flight to closed spaces like Discord, WhatsApp, or Slack, and daily I wonder when people did not have spaces of that sort, in the short history of the Internet. Private messages and group chats are by far my favorite places to be. But by and large the people I talk to in those spaces are people that I met on Twitter first. Discord is a friend’s home that a few stragglers retire to for one last drink after the nightclub, Twitter is the nightclub. This metaphor is terrible for I have never been a nightclub person. When I left a nightclub, among the handful of times I went, I was happy to never return.

But I always come back to Twitter.