Maybe Stick Around Twitter a Little While Longer?

5 min readMay 14, 2022

May 13, 2022, 11:04 pm
Filed under: community, Quitting, Social Media | Tags: billionaires, content, creepy billionaires, Elon Musk, Facebook, Instagram, Social Media, Tik Tok, twitter

Twitter has never been my drug. I wasn’t into it when it started and I only begrudgingly wade in there now. I used to set a timer for ten minutes so I could get in and get out. I’m not a fan of it but it’s where a lot of people are, so I feel obligated to check in with it and participate. I feel the same way about Instagram and TikTok. I have about five minutes of tolerance on those platforms before I am done. Facebook is stickier for me. Most of my friends and family are there. I love them. I like to be where I can see them. But regardless of my personal taste, these are the places people gather in these times. When I want to know what’s happening right this second, I check what people are talking about on Twitter. When I need to share personal news, Facebook is the answer. And every single one of those platforms is owned by a creepy billionaire. The fact that ownership of Twitter is switching from one creepy billionaire to another one is disturbing, sure, but I’m not sure that deleting our profiles is the answer. (Especially since, as I learned on Twitter, if you delete your profile, you lose access to your stuff but the platform retains it.)

We’ve got battles to fight against these billionaire types and we need ways to gather and organize and unfortunately, right now, the way to do that is ON these platforms owned by billionaires. Until we have other gathering spaces, I think we shoot ourselves in the foot by cutting off our access to other people. Is Elon Musk going to ruin Twitter? All signs point to yes — but given his tendency to not follow through on anything, it might not get that far. And before he ruins Twitter, assuming he does, I think we need to gather ourselves there, subscribe to people’s newsletters, blogs, podcasts or whatever. I don’t want folks to leave Twitter, not because I think it’s so great. I don’t. I have never liked it. But I do recognize its power and the fewer people who might have my back there there are, the more dangerous it becomes for me in that space.

Fact is, I am largely invisible on Twitter. Most of my tweets there have just one like — and that like is probably my mom. (Thank you, Mom!) I continue to cast my net there because you just have to cast your net everywhere when you make “content” on the web. When the people I know leave a platform, my chances of getting more than one like on a post diminish significantly. I know a lot of people deleted their Twitter accounts so as not to add value to Elon Musk’s portfolio, which I understand completely. I don’t want to see that guy get richer either. But the value of one person’s twitter account is NOTHING to Elon Musk, particularly if you’re not doing big numbers there. If you have a thousand followers, I’m sorry but you make not a speck of difference to his bottom line. I am absolutely insignificant in his portfolio with my 927 followers (990 before Musk took over). I don’t matter to Musk. If I had a couple million followers, though, maybe I could make a tiny drop of difference. (Also significantly, these millions of followers would also give me power to do things like get a publishing deal.) But if most of my million followers split, I would lose all of my power to make a difference and Musk doesn’t feel it at all.

I think sometimes people get a false sense of their own importance on a social media platform. They think saying something on Twitter is like saying something to some friends in a room. They think their account is more powerful than it is. This happens whether someone has three followers or a million, though, I’m sure, the larger the numbers, the larger the effect. Getting likes and followers CAN equate to real world power. People have gotten book deals or TV shows from single tweets or just having a certain number of followers. But that doesn’t happen for most of us. Most of us are shouting into a void, heard by a handful of people, if we’re lucky. I’m putting out stuff all the time so I’m used to it. But I watch others share my stuff sometimes with all their hope and enthusiasm and then watch as my stuff meets the same indifference that I experience most of the time. They get one like (from me!) and then maybe their mom (or mine! Thank you, Mom!) and then the thing is over.

But even though they don’t get thousands of likes from sharing my stuff, it is very meaningful to me that they took the time to post it. If the people who do that sort of thing for me from time to time were to leave, there would be no one to share my stuff at all.

It’d be just me, a bunch of famous people and Elon Musk left on Twitter and probably at that point, I’d have to leave, too. Which would be fine if people were engaging with my stuff elsewhere but they’re not. The current public commons are these weird billionaire-owned platforms. You leave the public commons and you leave the rest of us, those of us who feel we HAVE to be there for the sharing of our work, on our own, without any support at all. Don’t stay for Mr. Musk. He’s ridiculous. Stay for those of us with a few hundred followers and tiny social circles. You may not have power to dent Musk’s portfolio but you are significantly powerful for people like me.