An Age of Less, and Less Reliable, Information
What happens when Twitter dies?
I was reading a couple of articles on the slow, unpleasant death of Twitter the other day, mostly out of schadenfreude — hey, a guy’s gotta have some fun, right?
In many ways, the Muskification of Twitter has been great for me, because it incentivized me to quit the platform. I never posted much or made personal connections on Twitter, but I used it as an information aggregator. In many ways, it was great — I learned a lot and found a bunch of really useful stuff for my day job and my internet-writing hobby. But Twitter was manipulative, addictive, and made me feel bad much of the time. Being exposed to nonstop stimulation, especially the performative anxiety and outrage that Twitter specializes in, wasn’t great for my mental health. So I’m mostly glad that I had an excuse to quit.
Since quitting Twitter, I’ve replaced it in some ways — I mess around on Mastodon and subscribed to a bunch of newsletters — but haven’t found a full replacement for the informational serendipity of Twitter. It was cool to stumble across a thread on plummeting crab populations or Russian military truck maintenance and learn something fascinating that I would have never known to seek out.
