DON’T PICK UP THE GLASS EYES! 👀

Sensible people keep talking about leaving twitter for any number of sensible reasons but until there’s something else like twitter you’re ceding that ground. The uncomfortable truth is that those of us in the content production space (writers) need a place to produce our content

— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) November 2, 2022

A) The thing about Twitter is, as a mere reader of it, I don't have to read the replies to a tweet.  I can, but it's not the default for when I look at a thread.  I can read all the tweets by one person, or what they retweeted, and never see one reply to that tweet.

I have read replies before.  It's usually depressing.  Either people who think they are clever, and make the same joke that’s already been made over and over and over again (It reminds me of an interlude in David Sedaris' "Santaland Diaries” when he and his visiting brother visit a taxidermy shop in New York.  There's a display of glass eyes and a sign saying "DON'T TOUCH THE GLASS EYES.” The owner explains that the glass eyes have rough edges and could damage a real eye, and how many people think it's clever as hell to put one up to their eye, and he's sick of it.  Sedaris admits he'd had the same idea, thinking it would be both hilarious and original.).  Or you get the stupid statements of the kind that belong on Bad Legal Takes.  I mean, the "conversation" pretty much turns to shit within 5 replies (I think that's an undiscovered law of Twitter), and I don't think that's because you're limited to 240 characters.  It's because the people capable of coherent analytical thought are not on Twitter.

And why should they be?

B) The other thing is, Twitter is not the world.  If Twitter is the place you need to produce your content, you need to reconsider the quality of your content.  I'm under no illusions as to my "content" on this blog.  But then, it's free, right?  You get what you pay for.

C) I enjoy using/reading Twitter, but honestly, the angst stirred up by Elmo buying it and firing all the execs who pissed him off and firing the Board of Directors (quick: name one!) and otherwise, as far as I can tell, doing nothing to the website except planning to charge "blue check" holders a fee for the blue check (which I think will net Twitter even more lawsuits, but Elmo got rid of the pesky people who would pester him about such irresponsibility).  Well, I don't get it.

D) Auden said something once about poems and any writing done in your own hand, v. typed out.  He wasn't advocating writing poetry on a typewriter, but he said everyone loves their poems in manuscript for the same reason everyone likes the smell of their own farts.  When you see it in typeface, he reasoned, you see it more clearly and dispassionately.  I'm beginning to think that applies to Twitter users, especially this rather silly idea (pace Tom Nichols, but you are rather silly sometimes) that Twitter is an agora and we students of Socrates owe it to the world not to abandon it to the money-changers.  When the truth is we just like the smell of our own farts.

Now go find even half-a-dozen random Twitter users who even know an agora is, or what it has to do with Socrates.  And I don't mean just the clowns who illiterately pester Rick Wilson.