you wanna see a dead body?

RIP twitter, you hideous graveyard

What is dead can never die, probably, but Twitter may have died for real this time. Elon Musk just announced “rate limits” on how many posts users can view per day—6,000 posts for verified accounts (Twitter Blue and whatever), 600 for unverified accounts, and 300 for new unverified accounts. Now, I’m no Savvy Business Guy, but limiting views on a social media site feels like a death blow to the business model. Advertisers spend their dollars based on where they think consumer eyeballs are, and if you limit the number of eyeballs, then—goodbye advertisers! Of course, many advertisers have fled the site already (no legitimate business wants their products to appear next to a verified Nazi post) so Musk is probably still betting that he can turn subscriber dollars into a sustainable income stream. But why would a significant number of people fork over money to use a site that’s full of Nazis and limits how much time even its fiercest partisans can spend on it? Why were any of us even on Twitter in the first place? What was Twitter?

The Matter of Twitter is both a pressing issue and a deeply annoying one, because ultimately who gives a fuck about the hell site, it was just one social media platform among many others. But of course it was a social media site that had a tremendous gravitational effect on the cultural conversation, on politics and literature and changing social norms. Everyone in media used it; everyone in media needed it. The entire media attention economy has relied for the past decade or so on churning out tweet-sized nuggets of discourse that could be eaten and shat out into other nuggets of discourse. For people in media, Twitter and its daily digestive processes became the entire world, or the only world that mattered, and I think most of them imagined it always would be.

Many of those media people have now fled to Bluesky, where they mostly talk about how much better Bluesky is than Twitter, and repost things from Twitter, and repeat many of the same toxic behaviors they learned on Twitter. Bluesky, so far, is a lot like the rebound boyfriend after the terrible ex. He’s nicer but mostly in comparison to your ex, in fact you can’t even mention Bluesky in any context without comparing him to your ex, you lived in your ex’s world for a decade and he still dominates your every waking thought. His narrative of you and your possibilities is still the one you repeat to yourself; you can’t imagine a way of existing outside the assumptions he created for you.

So what were those assumptions? Twitter (and certain other sites) have operated on the premise that every type of relationship could exist in one place at one time, and that all these relationships were effectively identical. You could join Twitter to hang out with your friends and make new ones—probably its healthiest usage—but for people in media or would-be influencers of any stripe, you could also use it to build a following, a subscriber base, and a fan community. Most of the unhinged and unnecessary behavior on Twitter arose from toxic relationship incentives; you always had to get more attention, more followers, make line go up higher and higher, so it made sense to be as outrageous as possible. Attention was how you could advance your career and also how you justified your existence, both on the site and off of it. The site was only worth using if you were “good” at it (i.e. if you got a lot of attention for what you said), and you were only “good” and had something to say in the first place if people were noticing that you said it. So people said weirder and weirder things, and more and more people logged on to see them say weirder and weirder things, in among the brands promoting themselves and activists breaking important news and randos completely making up news as they saw fit until everything devolved into bigotry and horror and stupidity.

The bigotry and horror and stupidity, however, was always a key part of the appeal. What was Twitter? It was a place where you went to see dead bodies. Sometimes literally: people would sometimes post the bodies of murder victims, often under the pretense that it had some political utility (in the case of people murdered by the police, etc.) There are plenty of useful debates between activists over whether this is an effective tactic but regardless, Twitter thrived on awfulness, and if you posted awful things, people tended to pay attention to you, which further incentivized awfulness of all kinds. Some people posted upsetting news, while others capitalized on or mocked real grief and trauma: everyone was incentivized to be as aggressive and cruel and despairing as possible. From bigoted harassment to catastrophizing over world events to false “history” lessons in the form of Hold On To Your Pants Buckos!, what you logged on to Twitter to see was always awfulness in one form or another. Even though I’ve deactivated my account, and Twitter is dead to me spiritually if not quite yet physically, people still send me the bad tweets.¹ “Did you see this shit? How could anybody say this?” I don’t know. . . but I do know. I don’t know how a human being could fathom putting those horrible words in that stupid order. But I do know that lots of people will do just about anything for attention.

But of course, not everything about Twitter was bad (Twitter’s incentivized-inflammatory style has also made it extraordinarily difficult to argue that a thing can be both good and bad at the same time, and has even made “nuance” a suspicious word.) Twitter was a place to speak if you were unheard elsewhere; it was, at times, a place to organize or to supplement organizing. It was also, if you were discerning about it, a place to get news that you might not get from ordinary sources. When the story broke last weekend about the Wagner Group mutiny, I went over to Bluesky to see if there was any information. Mostly, though, I saw media people congratulating themselves for their ignorance of world events, unlike those loudmouth jerks over on Twitter, not that we’re still obsessed with Twitter or anything! So I closed out and went over to Twitter, where a few remaining foreign policy reporters actually provided some useful information. News on Twitter was always reliable if you didn’t treat it as 100% reliable, if you didn’t fall for every post you saw. I did fall for bullshit posts, sometimes—it was impossible not to, especially if presented in a sufficiently inflammatory or existentially terrifying or worldview-confirming language. Under the right conditions everybody wants to see a dead body, and everybody wants to show it to other people. “It’s horrible! Look at it!”

It may be that Twitter survives, or that Bluesky replaces it as the next undead graveyard of unburied human misery and stupidity that we display to each other. It may also be that we give up on this particular social media model altogether. Nothing lasts forever; no way of thinking or feeling or perceiving the world is ever immortal. The memory of that exciting but horrible ex always fades eventually. But the deathly grip that Twitter has had on the collective imagination of its users can’t be overstated, and it will take years to untangle its impact. We are so used to the way Twitter thinks that most of us can’t even imagine how to think without it.

Writers especially have been damaged by Twitter’s format and its terrible incentives: so many books these days are just tweets. Too many contemporary novels feel distracted, crammed with short smug political statements, riffs on Discourse from two years ago, and self-conscious snark directed at invisible enemies. And so many contemporary nonfiction books read like Twitter threads, snarky and polemical and lazy and just plain factually wrong much of the time. I read one recent book (on a similar topic to the one I’m writing now) in which the writer referenced a movie she’d seen and offhandedly said that she couldn’t remember how the characters were related to each other. But this was a well-known movie and she easily could have googled it or rented it, but she didn’t because she didn’t care, and obviously her editors didn’t care either, because she had that arch Twitter Tone directed at invisible cultural foes and anyway who cares what’s even true or not, right? You just absorb everything like it’s real and repeat it if it’s horrible enough while scrolling on to the next thing, feeling clever about yourself for participating in the Discourse until the world’s stupidest billionaire limits even your ability to do that.

Twitter may not be dead now, but it should be. It was never the whole world, and everything in it: it was just a dumb site mostly stuffed with horrible garbage. It’s okay to admit it was a bad place, a hellsite; it’s okay to admit that it had fucked up and damaging incentives. It’s okay to admit that it was fucked up and damaging for so many of us, especially writers and other media figures, to be so obsessed with it for so long. It’s okay to move on to something else, or nothing else; it’s okay if we’re not all stuck in the same place, shrieking about the same terrible things.

1. I actually briefly reactivated my twitter today because people were sending me the Bad Tweets and you can no longer see any tweets without an account, lol. I’ll deactivate again tomorrow.