Quitting Twitter in Tiny Town: A Preliminary Report on Twitter Changes and Their Implications for Fox News and Other Social Media Networks
We don’t have to be here, in Tiny Talk Town. We all know it. There are other places online that are a decent hang. But Twitter is unique, and its most fervent users are unlikely to leave en masse. Most of the knee-jerk reactions to Musk’s takeover aren’t that compelling. The smarter move might be a slow burn instead of a pyrotechnic exit—a thoughtful, considered approach to quitting Twitter without quitting Twitter. Think of it as quiet quitting, but for social media.
On this week’s Gadget Lab, we talk with WIRED platforms about the upcoming changes to Twitter and how they may affect the company’s future.
Tori wants you to encourage your male-presenting friends interested in fathering children to watch House of the Dragon on HBO. The new album from Natalia Lafourcade is recommended by Mike. Reexamining your relationship with social media is recommended by Lauren.
The Fate of the Cold Atom: A Small Talk about Musk and Sleptogenesis in the Tiny Talk Town Room (extended version)
You can find her on Twitter. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The producer of the show is Boone Ashworth. Solar Keys is our theme music.
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“Tiny talk is talk so small it feels like it’s coming from your own mind,” Musk fired off shortly past 10 pm last Thursday, a thought so deep it might have bubbled up from a fish-bowled dorm room. It’sCONGRATULATIONS: There is only one conversation about Musk in Tiny Talk Town.
Quiet Quitting on Twitter: A Case Study of an Electric Car Founder, Tim Feldman, and the Noisy World of Twitter
Quiet quitting is not rejecting the burden of going over and beyond in the workplace but simply not working overtime in a way that benefits your employer. On Twitter, it’s about not giving more to a platform than most people can expect to get back. If you want to stay on this new service, you need a way to use it without using you.
A small group of people are in charge of the social media site. Heavy users who use English account for less than 10 percent of the users, but generate 90 percent of all revenue, according to internal company research.
So active users are a noisy bunch, and it could be easy for an electric car entrepreneur who follows a lot of very active users on social media to mistake his own experience for that of everyone else. It’s the same for journalists. Half of the people who use tweeted less than 5 time a month are replies, while most of their posts are not original. They check in on current events or live sports or celebrity news, and then they go about their lives. They are referred to as lurkers.
Lurking isn’t doomscrolling, a practice (and phrase) that took hold during the early days of the Covid pandemic, when many people found themselves stuck at home and grasping at info on social media. Choosing to lurk, to sit back and observe for a while, is basically a heuristic and simplistic approach to dealing with the complexity and chaos that is New Twitter. Check in on Musk’s new toy, and then close your browser tab. Then disengage after you send a tweets. Keep one eye on it during basketball games. Use DMs if you have to, then direct those message threads elsewhere. Save your most original thoughts for another time, another place.
Feldman had taken screenshots of the sidebar whenever he logged into Twitter, both to document those efforts for himself and send the weirder ones to like-minded friends. He thought it would be interesting to take a look at them all.
The author told NPR that he’s always been interested in the words that try to describe buzzy topics as they either highlight seemingly insignificant things or try to boil incredibly complex topics down into just 280 characters. (That work was done by curators and according to an internal style guide).
He says that it’s not possible to sum up the political state of America in a social media post. “I both appreciated the effort and also could understand that, like, it’s such a weird effort. It’s inherently funny to speak in that sort of removed voice about anything, from the White House to users debating which type of ginger brew is the best. It’s the sort of thing where you don’t have to write a joke, you can just sort of appreciate the oddness of it.”
What’s Happening Online? A Micro-Blogging Archive for Current Trends and Persistent Leftovers from Elon Musk
“What’s Happening Online” organizes the descriptions both in a calendar view and a scrollable timeline that, as Feldman puts it, “you can read from start to finish if you have the patience and the stomach.”
In a note explaining his motivation and methodology, Feldman says the project serves “both as a reminder of some of the b**t that we endured this year, and as a sort of tribute to the people who powered it.”
That’s because while the trending topics are still very much a fixture of Twitter, the brief descriptions that previously accompanied them have not appeared on the site since Elon Musk laid off its curation team in early November. The project has evolved into a memorial to what was lost.
Feldman told NPR that as much as he is poking fun at the impossible effort to describe trending topics, he thinks it’s a shame that people have less information now than they did two months ago.
“Rather than seeing what’s trending and getting at least a little snippet of why that might be spiking, people sort of have to figure it out for themselves,” he says. When people do their own research on the Internet, it can quickly go sideways.
Feldman says he has no firm data-driven takeaways, but thought it was interesting to see certain trends reappearing over time (for example, how often conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro appeared on his list).
And he’s careful to stress that his archive is subjective by design. He decided to take screenshots manually so that he could log his experience of checking the micro-blogging site in a few short years.
He says that a topic has to have a description and that he wasn’t cherry-picking the funniest trends. He said his goal was to “emphasize the human elements,” like the written descriptions and the specific times at which he encountered them.
It’s hard to make broad statements about the internet for everyone according to a conversation with an NPR interviewer. I wanted to capture that sense a little bit.
Feldman says while he’s glad he took this project on, he was never planning to continue or repeat it, even before the trending topic descriptions stopped.
He saw it mainly as a learning opportunity and an excuse to check Twitter — though he did plan to make his archive public from the outset. And if scrolling through it makes you somewhat dizzy, you’re not alone.
Less than a quarter of the population use Twitter, but the limited public reaction has been mostly positive. People told him that they like it and that it made them crazy.
“I think everyone who … has an interest in this tool sort of knows that they enjoy it and it’s also reflective of like, ‘What am I doing with my life that I am interested in a lot of this nonsense?’ ” he says. “So I think people enjoy both the recap and also the sort of reflective nature of it, if I had to guess.”