At the tail end of June, I stopped posting on Twitter. I’d been inching toward that decision for a while, in large part because the space had become so joyless. I realized I was mostly there out of a sense of obligation, or maybe fear—if I wasn’t out their touting my own work, would anyone lay eyes on a single word I ever write? But though my particular line of work seems to demand some sort of constant public presence, I became increasingly convinced that I wasn’t garnering many new readers by, say, briefly opining about old training films. Add in some personal turmoil (including a maddening situation that drew way more attention than I’d bargained for) and I reckoned it was time to step away, at least from the creative end of the equation. (I elected to still reply to people if need be, though it’s rare that someone reaches out to me that way.)
Now that I have a little distance from the rapidly changing app, I do feel a bit nostalgic for those early days in 2007 and 2008—the era when I used Twitter to flag the weird and the wonderful for a handful of my fellow travelers. Accounts that hew to that ethos are still out there, and it’s my hope that they’ll remain as the platform morphs into whatever comes next. For me, the archetype of Twitter perfection is this stream of information about lighthouses, authored by the founder of the Lighthouse Directory. If only Twitter could be filled with millions of accounts that share its spirit, rather than people who seem to revel in sourness above all.
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