So Elon Musk did it, he bought Twitter. Now you may need to pay for your verified checkmark, and some people are rightly saying that maybe Twitter should be paying them for all the free content they've provided over the years.

I've seen many people say that they're decamping from Twitter for Mastodon, or other social platforms, but I don't think that there will be anywhere near enough people leaving Twitter for anyone to notice that it happened. Further, I've been on Mastodon for a while, and yes there are people there but it's a different beast than Twitter is.

I think a better question is Why am I doing the social media thing at all. I already don't do Facebook, I sort of do Instagram but it continues to become a worse experience all the time. To answer the question I need to look at the tangible benefits I've recieved from the service.

Any Benefit Theory

In Deep Work, Cal Newport, introduces the any benefit school of thought for network tool selection1. The idea is that when we see any benefit at all from a new network tool we use it. I've always found Slack to be a great example here. Yes it freed us from email, but it also means that many teams get constant messages from others that continually pull them away from their focused work.

When you don't have time to focus without interruption you can't make solid progress on your work. Lately I've needed to put fires out at work and when I come back to a complex JavaScript/PHP plugin I'm also building it takes me at least 30 minutes to get back into the groove I was in. Sometimes it's been a few days between working on it and despite taking copious notes about where I was last time, I still take 30 - 45 minutes working on it.

I'd guess that with the interruptions this single WordPress plugin has taken me an extra 5-8 hours to finish. Those hours are entirely wasted because they were all about reorienting myself on the code after needing to put out some fire, or attend to some message. It's easy to underestimate how much cost there is to switching our attention between things2 and we don't multitask at all. If you're multitasking, you're wasting time.

When you try to do two things at once you either can't or won't do either well. If you think multitasking is an effective way to get more done, you've got it backward.3

So, does the lack of checking email due to messaging in Slack actually make me more productive if I'm wasting many hours each week due to interruptions? Would I be better to simply check my email once a day and that be my only interruption?

The same idea can apply to any network tool. Jumping quickly into the flow of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, or your network tool of choice means you need to reorient yourself on whatever you were doing. It may mean you miss a meaningful conversation4 with someone you love. You're obvious lack of paying attention to them could leave your loved one feeling marginalized, and then you've got to repair that relationship as well.

The Benefits I Get from Twitter

Now, what are the tangible benefits I have recieved from Twitter? First, I've got lots of work due to Twitter connections. My current contract was one I got due to a referral from someone I met via Twitter. That work pays enough that I only need to work 5 hours a day 3 days a week to pay all my bills. Then the extra I make from memberships and SkillShare is simply bonus income I can use to pay my mortgage down faster.

Twitter has brought me many opportunities like this over the years. It's helped some of my early blog writing on code topics to get some notice and then I get referrals for work. This year alone a contact on Twitter has meant $100,000 in income. Last year I also worked for someone that I was introduced to via Twitter, so the last two years of my income are a direct result of my interactions on Twitter.

The other benefit that people often cite about social media is increasing your reach so that you can have a bigger "following". I've been on Twitter since January 2008 and have just under 3000 followers. I have my site set to create a Tweet for each article I publish which yields around 50 visitors and 60 views in a 30 day window according to my site analytics.

Compare that to Reddit, where I do almost nothing and get 40 visitors and around 50 views. I occasionally post a link to one of my videos in a Reddit thread when I'm compiling resources for my PKM newsletter but that may be 3 links in the last 6 months. Mostly other people post on Reddit and I get some benefits.

I suppose that leaves me asking, why post on Twitter if I get as much benefit for content distribution from Reddit. Heck DuckDuckGo brings me around 1000 visitors and 1200 views in 30 days and all I do is let it index my site.

While people talk about content distribution via social media, for most people most of the time they get no noticeable benefit. I'd wager that many people who have something "go viral" they see an initial bump, and then most people never stick around so there is still little benefit to the viral sensation status achieved in a fleeting moment.

The Bad of Twitter

So what about the "bad" parts of Twitter. For many people [[doom scroling]] is one of the biggest detriments of any type of social media. I don't do this on Twitter, but YouTube and Instagram suck me in regularly. I look up from an hour or two to realize that I wasted that time and feel empty inside after the time spent. I didn't do anything of value with that time. In fact, I bet I ignored my kids during it and they saw that my phone was more important than interacting with them.

The Twitter machine is not about deeply thought out opinions, it's about short pithy statements that might attract attention5. This unfortunately leads easily to [[polarized]] views as the more inflamatory the statement we make the more that it gets noticed by those around us. Then we get into echo chambers where those that interact with us are looking for something to inflame them, either to agree or disagree with what we say.

While you can put effort into who you follow and avoid some of this downside of Twitter, with Musk looking lifting many of the bans on people that have recieved lifetime bans I think that the problem of polarization will get worse. Unfortunately Musk equates lifting these bans with [[free speech]]. I see a future where abusive white men are allowed to continue on the platform while women and BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities will bear the brunt of racism out in the open6.

The perverse thing about our current racial structure is that it has always fallen on the shoulders of those at the bottom to change it. Yet racism is a white problem. It reveals the anxieties, hypocrisies and double standards of whiteness. It is a problem in the psyche of whiteness that white people must take responsibility to solve. 7

White men have caused much harm in this world, and it looks like they may be given more freedom to cause more harm on Twitter.

Another faulty assumption is that you have the chance to go viral on Twitter, and that it's going to be a good thing. Early in my web career Stumbleupon was a thing that clients asked me about. For those unfamiliar, you hit the stumble button in your browser and you went to a random website that was loosely tailored to preferences you told the Stumbleupon you had. In theory, people would discover your site and you get customers/subscribers/anything.

In truth, sometimes the Stumbleupon algorithim would favour you and you'd get lots of traffic in a fairly short amount of time. Then everyone would leave and you'd just have a larger than expected server bill to pay for.

That's about what "going viral" is. You get a bunch of people piling on you for a few days and then no one remembers you. Maybe you didn't think a statement all the way through, or it was purposely taken out of context, and the pile on is telling you how terrible you are. If you're a women or person of colour or don't conform to Judeo Christion gender expectations, then it's almost always going to be bad.

We each have about as much chance to go to the Olympics8. While there are numerious articles purporting to help you go viral on Twitter the truth is that you have a 1 in a 1,000,000 chance of going viral. Looking deeper into that article, many viral sensations were supported by huge email lists or even shady practices to get there.

So you're not going to go viral, and if you do, it's unlikely to help you at all.

Making Network Connections Offline

So if I'm going to step away from social media but I did find benefits in terms of actual paid work via connections I made on Twitter, how would I duplicate that work finding scenario?

Unfortunately that means I'd have to get out in the world and go to conferences. With 3 kids that have sports, and my wife being a kids figure skating coach, that's out of the cards for me. I can't get away for a weekend to go to a conference. I don't have a night of the week where I don't have kids to care for, so local meetups are likely mostly out as well.

In the summer I do have a local cycling club in Prince George where I've made friends. I haven't done any paid work, but I have helped one or two people set up basic sites for their businesses.

I still think that my the best bet for my business to continue to bring me work is to write blog posts, and record videos for others to see. While my focus is not coding for much of that effort, my research/PKM/productivity content continues to grow with it now bringing in around 1/5th of my income in a month.

If you were asking me how to further your career, I'd still say that you should write about what you're learning. Sure publish it on social media, but don't put much effort there. Your effort is better spent producing more content and publishing it on a site you own.

Further Reading