X, My Ex

Watching a platform recede.

“What is happening?!”

That question—with that punctuation—has greeted me every time I’ve come to X/Twitter in the past year or so. Which hasn’t been that often. In 2025, I’m going to try for “never,” outside of the screenshotting I’m doing for this post.

The punctuation seems like some good-natured, self-deprecating humor. Facebook’s interface asks me, “What’s on your mind, T?” Bluesky: “What’s up?” Threads: “What’s new?” All these are inoffensive and friendly, whereas Xwitter’s interface hits a note of panic.

That’s the sense of humor that endears Elon Musk to his remaining fans. Once upon a time—back when he was founding “The Boring Company” and talking more about benign innovation—it endeared him to me, too. But nowadays, Musk’s incompetence and intolerance are much more in evidence, and the joke is on all of us.

I don’t care if he proposed the name Department of Governmental Efficiency as a backronym for DOGE, like the circa-2010 internet meme or the Dogecoin cryptocurrency. I don’t care if he’s changed his username to “Kekius Maximus.” Look, even I don’t like wordplay that much.

Besides, that “?!” and its suggestion of hysteria just reminds me why I don’t do much social media in general. Long-form stuff like Substack is different. Most social media follows the Facebook/Twitter model: short, punchy updates as part of an endless infodump, all calculated to maximize engagement.

Happy people are not as engaged. Therefore, social media gravitates toward destroying your peace of mind. If it can’t give you a case of FOMO, it’ll throw important issues and/or people in crisis at your eyeballs until you become anxious and addictive, scrolling for answers that will never come. The patients-to-therapists ratio is too high. The inmates aren’t so much running the asylum as impersonating the staff while being conned into working for free.

I recognize that this kind of complaint is like when people used to call TV a “vast wasteland,” and that social media can do good in moderation. But no one involved seemed interested in addressing the format’s underlying issues, and that had driven me away from it long before Elon Musk got involved. I’m a lot happier on Substack. It feels more nuanced, less algorithm-driven. Writing a few thousand characters instead of a couple hundred, that’s my jam.

And yet, it’s pretty clear from the screenshot below that I didn’t always feel that way!

2011! Twitter was five years old then. The attitude surrounding it was still optimistic, a lot like the atmosphere Bluesky has now (cough).

I did admire subject-oriented Twitter accounts like Shit My Dad Says, and I took a stab at making one of those with Fake Bible, a comical line-by-line “translation” of the original text:

Not a big success, and now I wish I’d tried a lot of different joke accounts instead of concentrating so much time on the one. Still, at least I did something creative with the format while I had the chance.

I’ve thought about “leaving Twitter” in a more permanent way, deleting my accounts and everything in them, as some of my friends have done. Hell, Elon or one of his underpaid, overworked drudges might do that for me.

But I admit a twinge of nostalgia when seeing old things I’ve written, even when they’re insubstantial or uninteresting. Plus, there was this tweet, made from the gathering where I first really talked to the person who’d become my wife…

So, yeah. I’ve long since walked away…but I’ll leave those footprints behind.

Next: Crash blossoms!