I’m not sure how this next sentence is going to go over, but here goes: I miss Twitter. That’s not a surprise if you’ve been reading any of these posts. But I want to talk a little about the layers of loss I’m feeling. Still.
First, there’s the service itself. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I feel like one of the vital tools I used to have to navigate these increasingly confusing times has been lost to me. And it’s not just the news-gathering that I miss, but also the ability to share what I’m seeing and learning. Now, I understand there’s some hubris in that thought, but that’s one of the reasons I loved Tweeting out ideas in the first place; there was, more likely than not, a trusted follower who would gently correct me when I needed it. And that brings me to the next reason I miss Twitter.
When I joined the service in 2007, it was so I could follow one of the first communities I had found online. When we first moved to San Francisco a year earlier, I didn’t know more than a handful of people here. But they introduced me to their friends, and then we ended up at the same events and all of a sudden, we started to gather online around the pictures we took when we were together. And they ended up on Flickr. Those images, and the comments we left on them, was my first real San Francisco community. And gathering online led to us gathering in real life, where we took more pictures and posted them online, and the cycle continued. After Yahoo!’s acquisition, however, Flickr started to change and our community began to splinter. Thankfully, there were enough people in-the-know that we were able to reconvene on an emerging platform based in 140 characters. Once there, my community expanded globally. I miss the easy access to those voices multiple times a day.
That brings us to the final layer of loss, Twitter the company. It’s weird, I know, to have so much of one’s identity defined by a corporation, but I cannot really adequately express how close we were as colleagues. And still are. It is, in a sense, another category of community. We had a shared experience. A shared purpose. And shared values. But there was also an appreciation for the differences that each of us brought to the many problems we were trying to solve that made us greater as a group than we were as a collection of individual experts. It’s cliche to use a sports analogy about putting a team together, so in an attempt to avoid that, let me take another route: We were like your favorite band. Yes, we were competent as solo performers, no matter what instrument we played, but there was something magical that happened when we started playing together. We did become greater than the sum of our parts. Not every song was a hit, but the creativity and ambition in each of them could not be denied. I really miss those tunes.
I really don’t know where I am in the grieving process anymore. I’m not even sure I know how many total steps there are to work through anymore. But what I do now is I’m still sad. And mad. And I have no idea how, or if, I’ll ever truly get over this loss. Each of these layers is a lost community. And in a time where it’s harder to gather and the future is so unsettling, I’m finding that lack of supportive voices even more acute. But if you’re still reading these, please know that I appreciate you, and I’d love to rebuild a community with you. I just don’t know where or how. I’m open to ideas, though.
Show Me
30 November 2022
A community of characters.
I’m not sure how this next sentence is going to go over, but here goes: I miss Twitter. That’s not a surprise if you’ve been reading any of these posts. But I want to talk a little about the layers of loss I’m feeling. Still.
First, there’s the service itself. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I feel like one of the vital tools I used to have to navigate these increasingly confusing times has been lost to me. And it’s not just the news-gathering that I miss, but also the ability to share what I’m seeing and learning. Now, I understand there’s some hubris in that thought, but that’s one of the reasons I loved Tweeting out ideas in the first place; there was, more likely than not, a trusted follower who would gently correct me when I needed it. And that brings me to the next reason I miss Twitter.
When I joined the service in 2007, it was so I could follow one of the first communities I had found online. When we first moved to San Francisco a year earlier, I didn’t know more than a handful of people here. But they introduced me to their friends, and then we ended up at the same events and all of a sudden, we started to gather online around the pictures we took when we were together. And they ended up on Flickr. Those images, and the comments we left on them, was my first real San Francisco community. And gathering online led to us gathering in real life, where we took more pictures and posted them online, and the cycle continued. After Yahoo!’s acquisition, however, Flickr started to change and our community began to splinter. Thankfully, there were enough people in-the-know that we were able to reconvene on an emerging platform based in 140 characters. Once there, my community expanded globally. I miss the easy access to those voices multiple times a day.
That brings us to the final layer of loss, Twitter the company. It’s weird, I know, to have so much of one’s identity defined by a corporation, but I cannot really adequately express how close we were as colleagues. And still are. It is, in a sense, another category of community. We had a shared experience. A shared purpose. And shared values. But there was also an appreciation for the differences that each of us brought to the many problems we were trying to solve that made us greater as a group than we were as a collection of individual experts. It’s cliche to use a sports analogy about putting a team together, so in an attempt to avoid that, let me take another route: We were like your favorite band. Yes, we were competent as solo performers, no matter what instrument we played, but there was something magical that happened when we started playing together. We did become greater than the sum of our parts. Not every song was a hit, but the creativity and ambition in each of them could not be denied. I really miss those tunes.
I really don’t know where I am in the grieving process anymore. I’m not even sure I know how many total steps there are to work through anymore. But what I do now is I’m still sad. And mad. And I have no idea how, or if, I’ll ever truly get over this loss. Each of these layers is a lost community. And in a time where it’s harder to gather and the future is so unsettling, I’m finding that lack of supportive voices even more acute. But if you’re still reading these, please know that I appreciate you, and I’d love to rebuild a community with you. I just don’t know where or how. I’m open to ideas, though.
See you tomorrow?