Last year, even before a presidential election that was extremely unpleasant (both in its conduct and outcome), I had resolved to leave Twitter. Under Musk, the platform had become an unflushable toilet bowl filled with lies, insults, slander, propaganda. Mistruth after vomitous mistruth piled up in Twitter until that’s all one could see. After months of struggling with the reeking heap, I decided that for the sake of my own honor and integrity, I could no longer contribute to it. By mid-November, I’d stopped posting, and moved over to Bluesky.
This mirrored another slow move I’d been making on social media. In 2023, while in Ukraine, I deleted my Instagram account. At the same time I ratcheted back my posting on Facebook. I’d get much less traction on essays I posted, and posting them often led to the people who seemed to get the least out of my writing logging on to give me grief about it, or take exception to claims I made. I don’t have a problem with people disagreeing with me, so long as we can all agree on the facts. But these were people I knew explaining to me things I knew to be untrue — telling me obvious lies such as Russia had invaded Ukraine because of NATO, or that we were winning in Afghanistan until Joe Biden decided abruptly to withdraw U.S. forces.
To replace my posting on Facebook, I got more active on another network — Nextdoor. Commonly roasted on Twitter and other social media sites as a hotbed of bourgeois reactionary boomerism, on Nextdoor I found something I hadn’t really expected. Posting mostly about the garden or walking my dog — very commonplace and “local” ideas and ideals — my posts attracted interaction from a lot of neighbors, some of whom I knew, some of whom I didn’t.
Now people come up to me at public events and tell me that they enjoy my posts on Nextdoor. It used to be a person might hear about something I was doing or see an essay on Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook and tell me that they’d seen me on social media. Now it’s a person coming up to me at a colleague’s retirement party in New Haven and saying: “I enjoy your Nextdoor posts!”
This was the promise of social media. That activity and networking online would enhance things offline. Shopping would be easier. Friendships, more meaningful. Our lives would become more transparent to others around us in ways that added to both. We’d be sharing joys and experiences, and bettering humanity. For a while it seemed like that’s what was happening. If it was ever the case — I don’t remember, it was so long ago — it is no longer, especially on the platforms I’d been slowly and then abruptly abandoning.
While it’s easy to blame politics or culture — Musk’s purchase of Twitter, which I’d used to share stories and essays with readers and network with journalists; Zuckerberg’s rightward turn with Facebook — but it’s also that any time one invests too much time and effort into “building a brand” or establishing some sort of identity in an institution over which one has no control, fundamentally, one will end up losing. Facebook and Twitter are giant companies, whose ultimate goal is not to facilitate community or connections — it’s to sell their users on something. Maybe that something is advertising, maybe it’s a political or ideological vision of the world. Ultimately it’s not up to you, the social media user. It’s up to the people running the platforms.
Having said that, you have agency. The answer to places such as Twitter and Facebook becoming less usable, less friendly, is to use other platforms. Either stop using Twitter and Facebook entirely (as I said, I deleted Instagram, have deleted TikTok and am barely active on Twitter beyond logging in once a day or so to make sure nobody’s hacked my account) or pull back — and use other social media platforms instead, or none. As a writer and sometime journalist, I use Bluesky now instead of Twitter, and haven’t noticed any significant dropoff in readership or conversation. I use Nextdoor now instead of Facebook and what I lose in international reach, I’ve more than made up for in terms of connecting with neighbors. My social media life overall, I would say, since moving away from Twitter and Facebook, has improved. That’s not nothing.
I still haven’t found a replacement for LinkedIn, and I’m not certain that there’s one out there. Because I am happy with my job, I’m not really in the market for a replacement. And once one gets past the flood of drek from LinkedInfluencers, it’s pretty good for finding job opportunities and sharing analysis. I can’t complain about the place.
Folks, things have gotten better for me! If social media has you down and you’re on Twitter and Facebook, change things up. Leave the old, be a part of reinventing the new. And expect that when Bluesky and Nextdoor change and go awry — everything does eventually — there will be a new place for community to gather. Flexibility and adaptation is the human way. In an era of climate change and war, nothing could be more natural.
See you online!
The Local Blind Spot 