Mourning Twitter

I joined Twitter in 2007. I left a few weeks ago. I spent the better part of 15 years on the site. What did the site mean to me? So much.

It was instrumental in kickstarting my career. It was with me through multiple job changes that were announced properly with the Hoff protocol. It was there during a marriage and then the divorce, kids graduating from high school and college, and my grad school days. It came with me on a cross-country move. It was a place to grieve my father and my beloved Fred the Dog.

The global meeting place

Twitter was truly a global meeting place. From the beginning, you could interact with people from all over the world. For a short time, there was a glimmer of hope that maybe we had a platform to drive change in the world.

But in the beginning there was a lot of work to do. In the beginning everyone looked the same (as they do at the start of most technical platforms). People came from the same backgrounds and there weren't a lot of women. But for the most part, folks were open to discussion and being challenged on their assumptions.

I was younger then, and didn't realize the price I would pay for the emotional labor of explaining the racist and sexist behavior that people never realized they had. That work is exhausting y'all. But I made so many friends with those discussions, and learned a lot myself.

We watched global protests (Egypt, Wall Street, Standing Rock, Minneapolis..) and organized support for the people in the streets. It seemed like maybe the world could really change, until everything changed.

Darkness overtakes Twitter

I predicted the demise of the platform in 2014. This is when Twitter adopted the algorithms that made the platform more attractive to advertisers. It went from supporting thousands of open communities of practice to a platform where the users were now the product.

Twitter needed to pay the bill. And I can say from experience, the grid they built so advertisers could precisely find their target audience works pretty well. But advertisers aren't the only ones using the new marketing platform. Political groups and even governments use it to find audiences to monitor and even target with misinformation.

I was doxed (by someone in the technical community) when I retweeted and called out a racist tweet that supported the US Muslim ban. Other people have been targeted by weaponized twitter users and bots and have had their real life information exposed.

Twitter has not been a safe space for a long time. That is part of why I'm mourning Twitter - it had so much promise but was overtaken by that same old darkness that always seems to win. That darkness that promotes sexism and racism is a self-healing virus that always gets in the way of progress.

Community building in spite of algorithms

We built communities of practice on Twitter. Tons of supporting tools were built so that we could share content easier, and Twitter as a platform made all of that content searchable. We could discuss and debate openly. That meant sometimes an unknown expert would reveal themself and then our community would grow.

Twitter gave us a place to immerse ourselves in participatory culture:

A culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby experienced participants pass along knowledge to novices.

In a participatory culture, members also believe their contributions matter and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least, members care about others’ opinions of what they have created).

NewLearningOnline: Jekins on Participatory Culture

I left Twitter because the environment there makes a truly participatory culture impossible. So where do we go to build community? I am lucky to have very strong community ties to several communities. We're all trying to figure it out on Mastadon, Discord, here on LinkedIn and other places.

I am hopeful there was enough of a fire started with Twitter that another technical site will be built to fill the void. We need to continue building the communities that will build a better world. We need to learn when to leave things that don't serve that mission, or that overwhelm us with grief to the point that we can't see what to do next.

I mean, what if that's the overall goal - to bring us down so low that we can't get up?

Where to find me

You can find me here, and all the other platforms as gminks. My mastadon handle is @[email protected] .

Marketing organizations - this is a key opportunity to move back to building community as part of your advertising spend. I'll be writing more about that on www.digitalsunshinesolutions.com . Be sure to follow our LinkedIn page for more discussion.

Are you mourning too? Let's talk about it!