10 Tips for Leaving Twitter | 2238

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My feeds today are full of people expressing their desire to leave the bird site. 

By quite some margin, the most successful Episode I’ve made so far this year has been 10 Tips for Creators in 2022.

Produced from my experience after making over 16 hours or 200 episodes of a different type of social media.

If you are new around here or listening to Permanently Moved for the first time, I direct you to that show. It’s a companion to this one.

10 Tips for Leaving Twitter

1. Have Some Ambition

Whatever you decide to do after leaving Twitter, I hope it’s ambitious

The average Twitter user spent 5 hours a month there. Just 10mins a day

Some of you are leaving after regularly spending 15 hours or more there a week

Remember, according to the place you are leaving, tweeting three to four times a week made you a heavy user

Posting just 1200 characters was apparently enough to make you a meaningful contributor to our collective culture

It did not

2. Pay Attention

Your Attention is Sovereign

Where and what you are going to put your attention on is currently the single most important question you have to answer for yourself 

Cultivate and relearn the practice discernment

Attention is such a powerful a resource that humanity harvests it for profit

Humans create and consume culture just as the bees produce and consume their honey

Consider the quality of the honey

Consider the bee keepers intentions

3. Who Cares Anyway

Next time you go out for coffee or dinner, take note of how long it takes for the conversation around you to turn to something that happened on social media

Twitter is only the 15th biggest social network on the Internet

Talking about your pinterest collection is actually more relevant to more people than any event that occurred on Twitter

It is likely no one cares more about Twitter than you did

4. People Stop Playing Games All the Time

Do not feel remorse or regret for putting Twitter down

Nine out of 10 people do not finish a game they have bought and paid for

Twitter was a terrible game

Followers, likes, retweets and replies. A big chat room with added metrics

Wherever you’re going next, that old scoreboard has no relevance now

5. Play a Different Game

There are two types of players. Uploaders and downloaders.

Don’t get sucked into short form videos, unless you’re making them. 

Otherwise it’s pure downloading and penny theatre.

Write, think and create in more than 240 characters.

Level up

It’s check out my Tumblr, not check out my Tumblr post

Create and curate content to be consumed in aggregate, not isolation

For the love of blarg start a blog, a newsletter, a Youtube channel

Whatever

6. What Do You Want to Do Instead?

I’ve changed my mind. Uploader and Downloader player types are a bad metaphor

And a bad metaphor, Tyson Yunkaporta reminds us, is a curse

All of the web is viewed through the metaphor of the window

Take this good metaphor seriously

You move horizontally across the web, not upward into abstraction

Tip the gnostic up and down of cyberspace outward into the field.

Ask yourself: Are you looking in through the window of the web browser or are you looking out?

7. Subscribe to My Newsletter

Twitter metrics have pickled your brain

An audience of 7 is not disheartening or pathetic

7 people in your living room is wonderful – if a little crowded

If all of you listening right now were together in person we’d need a local theatre

Twitter made you lazy.

Up and down created hierarchy.

It’s the to-ing and fro-ing that creates the relationships

If you choose to play a different game, tell people. You can’t take your network with you

If someone decides to play a different game, like and subscribe

Follow them wherever they are headed, you might make new companions on the journey

8. Create Something (Every Week)

You’re not on Twitter anymore, there’s so much extra time

Create something meaningful to you

Spend a few hours doing it

Do it regularly

Don’t get mad if others are doing it too

The publish button is the same for you as it is everyone else

9. What Are You Willing to Pay For?

Creating anything more ambitious than a tweet requires graft not craft

These 5 mins of social media right now are the result of multiple hours of my life, in both effort and time

If you come across something online that is meaning–full, consider paying for it

Remember: You never spent a penny on Twitter because it was all meaning-less

10. Read the room

You are leaving a place that has done immense damage to our society and culture

You and I share in that complicity

Wherever you decide to go, whatever game you decide to play, it is likely there are other people already playing

Complete the tutorial

New worlds have different norms and different cultures

Check the date when you arrive, it likely reads Eternal September

Consider that you may have brainworms and may need quarantine

Watch

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The script above is the original script written for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in the edit.

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