Are we too broken for BlueSky?

Meditations on Twitter, BlueSky, and what we've become

Here’s your hot take: Eland MuskOx* didn’t ruin Twitter. He merely rendered it unusable.

Who really ruined Twitter? We did.

the Beginning

I’ve been on Twitter for a long time. Entire cars have been bought new and driven to death in the time since I got on Twitter. I was a pretty early joiner in 2009, when science bloggers (as I was then) all eagerly pounced on the opportunity to share and chitchat together on this new exciting platform. There were deep conversations, fun and silly jokes. Subtweets and so much drama.**

Most of us felt the joy and the fun over all these things, but what I think we also felt, but barely ever talked about, was the underlying excitement. If you just said something clever enough, got noticed by the right people, something, then magic would happen. Virality was in the beginning generally a good thing. As a writer, sometimes it was your work that got noticed. You might catch the attention of an editor. You might end up in the New York Times! There was a constant feeling that you were where things were happening, and anything was possible. Editors were listening. Other writers were reading.

For the first time, on Twitter, I felt like Someone. I felt worthy of being someone. I was not just a girl who peaked in college, not just the weirdo in grad school who people rolled their eyes at for singing to the mice (I mean really, to be a weirdo in grad school? You have to be weird)***. I was clever. I was funny and charming. My followers were engaged, and I felt like they really cared about what I wrote. People much more famous than me talked to me, and seemed to care what I thought. I remember when I passed 30,000 followers, which was the size of the small city I’d grown up in. Nowadays, 30,000 followers to most of my colleagues is probably merely cute. Some have several million. But at the time, I felt I’d done something, grown into something more.

When I left academia 2013, I faced a deep existential crisis. The kind of thing that people on TikTok cutely call a “menty B”****, but which in reality was not remotely cute. I had failed out of academia. I was no longer a scientist. I didn’t know who I was.

But because of Twitter, I knew I was not alone.

the Middle

Because of Twitter, I had connections. Because of Twitter, I’d ended up at conferences with other people who were real, honest-to-god science journalists, a title I wouldn’t have the courage to claim honestly for myself until 2019 (really! More about that later if anyone wants to hear it). Because of Twitter, those connections helped me to find out about, and secure, a job in science writing.

There were ups and downs. Scandals and terrible things that felt like they were ripping apart communities we had formed.***** But real things happened! Twitter helped build movements and bring people together. Here’s your obligatory reference to #MeToo and Arab Spring and the many other great things that happened.

There was a time, say, around 2015, when I always had Tweetdeck open. I always had two major windows open: My email, and Tweetdeck. I know that I wasn’t alone. I checked in all the time, eagerly jumping into conversations, DMing friends, or just keeping up on what was happing. I felt incomplete without it. Twitter, by then, was where my people were. Where my connections were, my colleagues. Other writers seemed to see what we wrote, shared it. I know I spent many years industriously sharing the science writing I was reading, both for the sake of my colleagues and to build my brand (not that other serious science writers say the word ‘brand’ out loud. It’s unseemly).

Over time I began to see things change. The algorithm changed. The rich—those very “good at Twitter” or with dedicated fan bases—got richer, amassing hundreds of thousands of followers. Most of the rest of us stayed relatively the same size, tweeting hopefully. But our engagement began to drop. Things that used to get lots of likes got fewer.

This is partially because as the algorithm changed, so did we. The most famous on Twitter—most likely unable to keep up with the constant deluge they got of comments and responses and, more and more often, hate—engaged less. They’d tweet, and walk away. It became less and less likely that anyone would see anything you wrote.

Then 2016 hit. Twitter became the outlet for many people’s rage and anguish, the fear over what we were becoming. The algorithm picked up on that. Rage tweets did better and went further. Conversations got replaced by “here’s why if you’re not mad you’re not paying attention and if you’re not paying attention you are unquestionably a Bad Person 1/n”. QTs went further if they were dunks. The better angels of our nature were too raging with injustice to tell us maybe not to Tweet.

With this came an aspect of performance. If you did NOT weigh in and adamantly say you were pro or anti something, you clearly were on the other side. Your silence spoke volumes, even if your silence was because you were not actually on Twitter at the time and had no idea what was going on.

At the same time, and very weirdly, Twitter grew up. It became professionalized. There were accounts that specialized in being Good At Twitter. Those of us who used to feel like Someone began to feel like no one again. But we kept tweeting, increasingly into the void.

the End

By the time 2020 slammed into us all, Twitter was already a pretty un-fun place to be, but with the pandemic, it became urgent. We needed to be there, needed to see everything happening, case counts in real time. We live-tweeted as our collective sanity became strained to the breaking point.

But the strain also emphasized how much we had changed. We had become less forgiving. Friendships on Twitter were rarely truly true friendships. Most couldn’t survive the first simple disagreement, let alone a real fight. This, I think, is because on Twitter, we all, all of us, forgot how to argue in good faith.

You might feel affronted by this. You, of course, always argue in good faith.

No. You don’t. I don’t. When you enter an argument and you want to make the other person look bad? Good faith is gone. When you enter an argument and want the other person to realize that they are bad? Good faith has left the building. Good faith arguments are not always the best arguments to have. But they are arguments where you consider another person’s perspective. On Twitter, that nuance is never rewarded, and it’s usually attacked.

A sign that good faith arguments have left is that, since 2016 and then 2020, no argument has ever been about the thing it’s actually about. We joke that you tweet “I love bread so much never take it from me,” and someone will reply “that’s great for you but I have celiac disease and I would die” and within about 5 tweets someone is accusing someone else of ableism. It’s a joke. But it’s not.******

These arguments aren’t just trolling. They’re a reflection of what we’ve become—people quick to lash out in our own pain. People see the “you” of any given tweet and interpret it as meaning them, specifically. Every tweet really is about us.

Twitter, for many of us, began to be a misery. A place we wanted to leave and didn’t know how. The good times we remembered never happened anymore. The bad times happened all the time.

Then the embarrassing man with an ungulate-adjacent name bought Twitter.

the End is the Beginning

Signing in to Twitter right now is like seeing a dive bar after one hell of a night. Desolate, mildly sticky, with solo cups and broken glass and one dude who still thinks he’s important yelling in the corner.

It has varied week by week where people go. Mastodon, Post, LinkedIn (do we like pain?), now BlueSky.

When I got on to BlueSky, though, I was surprised. People were cheerful. Having fun. Posting weird and cool animal facts. They were hopeful. A new place. A place without the terrible memories and years-long aura of desperation.

But place doesn’t matter if it’s the same people in it.

I’m already seeing rage posts like the ones that flooded Twitter. “Why is no one talking about” (with the implication that you must be ignoring it because you are a bad person). I’m already seeing more people screaming about Nazis than there are actual Nazis.*******

There is a place for rage. There is. But if I’ve learned anything in the past few years, it’s that we can’t live our lives on rage. We can’t fix things on rage alone. But I don’t think we know how to be any other way anymore.

I’m also already seeing people trying to build audiences, working for the brand. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s what many of us need to do to survive (coughs, looks at self in mirror). But that’s now how most people made Twitter happen for them. Most people made it happen through community. None of us have time for community anymore. We’ve got the few online friends left that we haven’t alienated by saying the wrong thing or siding with the wrong person. We’ve got too much work to find or to do. We are afraid to say anything truly genuine, because genuine hasn’t been rewarded in a very long time.

For science journalists, journalists in general, Twitter made so many of us. Readers for the first time began to look at the bylines (ok some of them, most still don’t). We connected, we learned from each other.

But we learned bad things as well as good.

I want to be hopeful. I can’t. Because I don’t think a new app will fix us until we can fix ourselves.

Where have you been?

Is it reading about how a company is now trying to use invasive Burmese pythons as fancy handbags? I know a lady who’s a python contractor who’s been making python wallets and bags and what have you for years. Waiting for her to get her Guardian article.

Maybe it’s reading this rather hopeful piece on the power of small favors. “When times turn tough, even small favors can make a huge difference. Because that's when our survival depends on it.”

I’ve been reading a lot on Ozempic, but this is an important point—it has a powerful effect on how our brains process reward (note: MOSTLY in mice).

Where have I been?

Talking to Tove Danovich about pests as she writes about the feral chickens of Hawaii!

Otherwise, yes, posts haven’t been super frequent. Why? I’m doing freelance work, the results of which you will see in later newsletters! Stay tuned!

*Apologies to both Elands and Muskoxen, who do not deserve this affiliation. You are both lovely ungulates.

**The subtweet from the lady saying “who really wants yet another crappy homemade baby blanket. No one.” when I had just sent her a homemade baby blanket will live rent free in my head forever. Thanks.

***It was Handel.

****No. No. Absolutely not. You are NOT going to cutify a bloody mental breakdown into a small crying jag. No. Get off of my lawn.

*****When I went back recently to delete all of my DMs because I’m sure that’s gonna break sooner or later and I don’t want people finding my phone number, I counted not one, not two, not three, but SEVEN different conversations I had with people who turned out to be sexual harassers. Bottle of wine each for dredging up those memories. Thanks boys.

******And YES, before you come for me, some of these arguments are important. Nazis are bad. Always. No exceptions. The effects of colonization are real and ongoing, ableism is real and ongoing, sexism is real and ongoing, and anti-trans stuff is so real right now please just LET THEM BE. Come on! My point is, not every conversation about pop tarts needs to be about identity, and not all of them are about you.

*******See above. Don’t give them oxygen. They’re totally thrilled you see them and you’re mad about it. Block, report. Block, report. Block, report.