Grief for Twitter
Grief for Twitter
Finding each other online (or failing to)
Hello, I’m Kyle Chayka, a staff writer for The New Yorker, a guy on Twitter (for now), and author of the forthcoming book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. This is my personal newsletter, where I share my recent work and publish original essays. Subscribe here.
My latest New Yorker column is on a feeling that many people are having right now: being on the Internet kind of sucks, at least a lot more than it used to.
Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore
The biggest reason I feel that way is the total decay of Twitter. Twitter used to be the watercooler of the Internet, something like a universal chat room holding millions of people at once where you could reliably find someone talking about pretty much anything you were interested in. It could have been medieval art history, the theory of international relations, housing codes in Germany, or an obscure anime. The ambient chatter produced a sense of what was happening in the world right now, unimpeded by automated recommendations. Simply by opening the app you could get a vibe: which events were in the public consciousness, what your friends were obsessed with, even what the weather was doing.
I could depend on my Twitter timeline to deliver a cross-section of what I was interested in, a feed that I hand-curated over more than a decade that had become something like a mental appendage. It was a community of people all thinking out loud at once, together, creating a pure distillation of the zeitgeist. Of course, under Elon Musk’s ownership that has all fallen apart. I miss the voices I used to hear chattering in my ear every day. I miss the inspiration and the energy that the community delivered. Not the standard news-posting accounts or the established influencers, but the oddballs like me who had stuck around quietly but consistently pursuing our own little niches.
Those voices have gradually fallen silent. They either left the platform intentionally or their tweets just don’t reach me because of the increasingly algorithmic, increasingly glitchy feed. I question every day why I’m still on there. In part it’s a habit, or an addiction: I still crave the background noise while I’m writing, the chance to open a new tab and dip into a raucous conversation. (Similar to how I always want to work in coffee shops, with the distraction of public commotion and randomness.) But that noise no longer has much value. Twitter today is not a crystal ball. It’s foggy, gauzy, all static interference and nonsense. We still go there expecting news, information, insight — the quality of human thought that we came to expect. I have to remind myself that that’s a mistake.
The thing is, I’m not so sure where to get human thought on the Internet anymore. Threads, Meta’s Twitter clone, has an aggressively algorithmic feed. Instagram, which remains a pretty fun place on the Internet, is decidedly not a good place for actual information (as opposed to vibes). Substack increasingly looks like the best option, because it is non-algorithmic and sustainable through monetization, but its Notes social network is sleepy. Still, I think this newsletter is where I want to cultivate a community of readers and writers, to create an ongoing conversation — the kind I used to have on Twitter.
Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture comes out January 16, 2024 from Doubleday! Request it at your local bookstore or pre-order here.
People asking me where to go from Twitter generally get the same answer: “Outside.” Go outside, encounter people organically. You’ll soon realize that Twitter is the crazy guy on the street corner with the bullhorn.
That said, Substack, for now, is an option. I’ve had terrific conversations, met interesting people and read interesting things on Notes. You can enjoy a more substantive dive by reading the person’s stack.
The other day I read an interesting note by an author, interacted with the author in the comments, and then read several of his Substack columns. A day later, I ordered two of his books.
I never joined Twitter.
For all it's problems, I was sticking around with Facebook out of sheer habit, until a few weeks back I was mindlessly scrolling and realized something:
A website to connect friends, families, and colleagues? Completely gone.
I went ahead and counted. I received about one actual post from anyone I know for every twelve sponsored post, ad, group, attempt to pivot me to Stories, and attempt to get me to friend people I don't know. The Stories in the feed are really ads for media: segments of Family Guy, The Office, or similar popular television shows with the statements like "the writers should get paid extra for this scene 🤣🤣😭😭🤣🤣" Very little of this sponsored, ad, video stuff is connected to any interest I ever stated on FB ever. For instance, I don't really watch Family Guy and I saw The Office once but don't, like, reference or tag it or share Office memes or anything.
The posts from people I know are the hard core users and it's usually when they share something from their own meme page follows. It's rarely the personal stuff they post. I went ahead and checked: people are still posting their thoughts, feelings, life updates, etc, but literally none of it is reaching me.
Which raises the question of what Facebook is for. Again, the premise is, "all your community is here." But they aren't.
In it's current algorithmic decay, Facebook is literally just taking your thoughts and feelings and using it as metadata to feed you nothing but ads and marketing. Not metaphorically or "in order to monetize engagement" or whatever, but that's the only thing it does.
If Facebook was offered in it's current form, would anyone have ever joined? "This is a new website where you post thoughts and feelings and reaction to news in order to get an endless feed of ads for cellphone games and boots." Fundamentally it doesn't make sense to participate, those ads are everywhere else too.
Other people bailed on Facebook a lot sooner than I did, with the same complaints I have now, but it really is to the point where there's actually no content there. I'm out.