Cultural Vandalism — My Eulogy for Twitter
I really liked Twitter. But it was vandalized. So I’m leaving for BlueSky and Mastodon. Or at least I’ll try those platforms out and maybe they’ll stick, but maybe they won’t and I’ll just fade away into the proverbial social media sunset.
I’m sad about it. I’m sad about it because Twitter was my platform — the only real-identity based social media platform I’ve ever felt comfortable using. I don’t have that many photos I want to share on Instagram. I consume content on YouTube, but also have little interest in sharing video content [1]. I’ve gradually lost my desire to “broadcast” anything reasonably personal or private on the Internet, so I rarely share anything on Facebook. I just can’t get behind a constant stream of short video, a la TikTok , for either consumption or creation.
Twitter was unassuming. I knew going into it that nothing I said would be private, so there was no pretense of needing to set the perfect access controls on my content. Sharing content publicly was easy, even if the content was not native to the platform itself. I could write blog posts about anything and find an audience. A large part of my professional network was on it. As a grad student, I started blogging about academia and research and gradually built up a small but real audience of folks who have told me that my writing has helped them in one way or another. And I loved that. I loved having this easy connection to mentors and mentees, strangers and close friends.
And this is why it was really hard for me to move to Mastodon years ago during the initial Musk takeover. I had a better reason than many: at the time of the takeover, I was working part-time at Twitter as an applied sciences consultant and my whole team was immediately fired. I tried to leave — I faithfully created a Mastodon account [2]. But I never really used Mastodon. As much as I loved the idea, and despite being able to connect with some of my network there. The platform just didn’t feel like it was mine. It didn’t have the weight of my formative experiences gently holding me to it, and so it was easy for me to flutter away with any passing breeze.
So I stayed on Twitter because I convinced myself that my non-participation would not do anything, and that I would just sink with the ship. That I didn’t really need or want to recreate my experience with Twitter by moving to a new platform — that I would just let my experience with Twitter be what it was, and stop altogether when the platform inevitably failed and died.
But it didn’t fail and die. The ship isn’t sinking, it just stinks from all of the enshittification. Maybe I was even unwittingly bucketing water out of the hull, helping keep it afloat.
I gradually have come to realize that I’m just on a terrible cruise being captained by some of the worst people in our generation. A friend of mine described the Musk takeover of Twitter as cultural vandalism. Someone with a lot of money decided he would buy a good thing that brought value to so many of us and just…fuck it up.
So I guess I have to go. At least for now, and I don’t really see that changing any time soon.
If you want to keep up with cutting insights like this, feel free to follow me on BlueSky and Mastodon. I’ll try those for a while. For real this time.
BlueSky: scyrusk.bsky.social
Mastodon: sauvik@hci.social
BlueSky starter pack for HCI + usable privacy and security researchers: https://go.bsky.app/RGsu5jn [3]
Footnotes
[1] I tried for a while, but stopped as soon as I had a kid.
[2] Ironically, because I was a contractor I outlasted most of the rest of my team by a week.
[3] Let me know if you want to be added to this starter pack.
