An Essay on the Death of the Twitter Promise (Off Topic-ish)

I joined Twitter in November of 2008 because I was planning a trip and needed to secure sponsors and funding. At the time, that’s one of the steps that you’d take. The whole influencer thing wasn’t what it is now. While doing that, I helped create a thriving sea kayaking and canoeing community on Twitter with the help of other bloggers (remember those days) and other paddlers. The paddling companies embraced it. There was authentic dialog between the companies, the users, and sponsored paddlers, and it was great.

I raised a bunch of sponsorships in gear and cash for the trip I was planning to do. I ended up failing on that trip because I hurt my rotator cuff teaching rolling in a pool a week before I left and that led to having to use a weird paddle stroke that I hadn’t trained for and then to tendonitis. When I quit about 20 days into the trip, I must have sat for an hour with tears in my eyes and my head in my palms. But I digress.

After I called the trip off, I approached the companies about the failure. All but one company understood. The one company that were jerks berated me in email and on the phone. They also weren’t on Twitter and because social media wasn’t what it turned out to be in the years that followed, they could easily abuse their sponsored athletes.

After Facebook started to do pages and then groups, the paddling community mostly left Twitter, blogs and BBSs, and fractured into a bunch of groups on Facebook. If you are a paddler, Facebook is where the online community is now. Blogs are dead. Twitter is dead for the paddling community. BBSs are dead. It’s Facebook now.

It hasn’t felt the same as Twitter in 2008. That felt like as paddlers we were exploring something new. It was exciting even if I was on dialup internet.

Over the years on Twitter, I saw the culture change from one of mainly good people to one with many people devoted to hate and trolls. Although there were and are good and unique parts of Twitter, political Twitter seemed to come to dominate most everything there. It got so bad that I received a number a death threats over the years for supporting Clinton or criticizing Duluth Pack when they hosted a kid of a politician.

None of that was moderated.

My house was even doxed with photos by a right-wing extremist from Florida. I actually managed to find his house, phone number and figure out who he was after he prank called me over and over. After an hour of Twitter, I had him understanding my side of the issue and agreeing with me. I probably should have reported him to the FBI, but he was a traumatized and radicalized veteran.

At any rate, the political domination of Twitter spread to the reporting world. Because many reporters would use Twitter as a way to see breaking news, Twitter influenced reporters in a negative way. One of the reasons that reporting is so bad now is because of the way that Twitter amplifies a narrative that may or may not actually exist in the real world. There was one demagogue particularly good at exploiting that, and foreign (no matter what your country is) propaganda and disinformation campaigns have exploited it.

In the US, Twitter is so toxic now that it has come as far as people joining or leaving Twitter due to their personal political motivations and how those personal tribal beliefs relate to the new robber baron owner. The wingers are joining just to see the “shitposting” owner try and own liberals. He is behaving in a way that you wouldn’t allow in your own house if he were your crazy uncle.

Having watched the changes at Twitter over the last 14 years has been interesting, exciting, and sad. But now, I feel bad for the employees of Twitter. They are being abused by an abusive employer now. Some are being fired with no warning – likely against some state laws – some are being forced out via ultimatum and others have to stay in the abusive relationship that is now demanding they work long hours every day with forced overtime while sleeping in the office. They have to stay because their families rely on the health care plans or have visas and face being deported if they lose the job.

Nobody deserves to be in that position.

While I can’t imagine being put in that position, I can empathize with them, and as a long-time user I do feel grief. I met a lot of real people and formed online relationships with them and even met some people in person because of that app. Watching the changes happening there is like watching a trauma inflicted onto a community.

It sucks for all the long-time users.

You see a lot of grief on the platform and some people hanging onto hope, and a lot of “owning the libs” going on. If you are part of that later group, try to understand that people there had real communities of friends and those communities are suffering. If you can’t understand that, then maybe you should stop reading my blog because you aren’t the type of person – someone with empathy – that I’d like to associate with.

Anyway, this is what happens when we base our social structures around platforms owned by robber barons. Right now almost all our online infrastructure is owned by some company who only cares about profit, wants to impose their will onto to you, or just sees you as data that they can sell. And due to the way that it’s set up, if you want online relationships you have no choice.

They don’t care about you.

Luckily, where I live most of our online infrastructure is provided by a coop guided by elected board members. There’s some public accountability. That’s not true with this version of social media though. As we see at Twitter, your online life is owned by the whims of a robber baron.

We all deserve better than to have all our online relationships held hostage by billionaires.

We all deserve better.