Not Another Think Piece About Twitter, I Promise!
Okay, I lied. Sort of.
This isn't going to be a think piece about the slow decomposition of the birb app, days after everyone else has already written theirs. Instead, it's gonna be a bunch of disconnected thoughts about the slow decomposition of the birb app. I promise they probably won't be thoughts you've already seen! Yay?
Twitter is picking a really shitty time to go to shit
I've been having a million different feelings about Twitter's herky-jerky tailspin, many of which others have already expressed better than I could.
But part of my complicated reaction comes from the fact that Twitter is reaching its final form just as COVID starts to come roaring back. In the SF Bay Area, hospitals are already overwhelmed with a combo of COVID, RSV and flu, and a lot of experts are predicting a much worse national COVID surge after Thanksgiving.
In other words, it's about to get much harder to connect with people in the World of Meat, so it hurts much more that we're losing one of the ways we've been able to stay connected online. It hurts a lot more, because so many of us are already so isolated, and now we're going to be even more cut off.
I don't think newsletters can replace Twitter, because email sucks
I'm sorry it's been a while since I wrote one of these newsletters. Partly, this is just due to being extremely overcommitted. I've been writing New Mutants for Marvel, putting the finishing touches on Promises Stronger Than Darkness, the third book in my young adult space opera trilogy, and doing a big roundup of the year's best science fiction and fantasy books for the Washington Post. Plus a ton of other stuff. (I'm not linking to any of it, because I've stopped including links in my newsletters in the hopes that people will actually receive them.)
But another reason I haven't gotten around to writing another newsletter is because I've lost faith in newsletters, somewhat. This is largely because email sucks, and using email to get content to people seems like a really flawed model that can't replace stuff like social media and actual news sites. Newsletters get mixed in with important work emails and messages from your friends and loved ones, and often mail clients like Gmail will shunt the newsletters into a siloed folder so you have to go looking for them. I don't know too many people who sit and think, "I wish I received more email everyday." I personally have to remind myself to read all the interesting newsletters I've subscribed to, instead of always going to various news sites for opinions and updates.
I've seen a few people saying in the wake of Twitter's turn towards autoanalingus that they're going to start using RSS feed readers again, and that seems like a way better way of curating stuff. (And here's a good place to mention that you can subscribe to my newsletter, Happy Dancing, using RSS to get it in your feed reader of choice.) It would be hilarious if newsletters started evolving back into blogs, but also kind of a good thing? I miss blogs, tbh.
I need to separate self-promo from building community
Part of what made me feel gross about Twitter (and other social media) is the fact that community-building and self-promotion are largely indistinguishable.
Of course, these two things can never be cleanly separated, at least not entirely. Your friends will support your work, and people who support your work enough will become your friends.
But in a lot of contexts, one is the point and the other is a by-product. If you organize a really cool event that brings people together in the real world, you will gain some exposure for your personal projects, but mostly on the margins in my experience. (I know tons of event organizers and community leaders whose hard work is largely taken for granted, and whose personal projects get no exposure from their organizing work. And they do it anyway, because they love bringing people together. And a lot of the things that creative people do to promote their shit will bring people together, but only incidentally. (Maybe your author tour leads to people in the audience making friends, but that's clearly not the main point: the main point is to promote your books.)
I miss doing the Bookstore and Chocolate Crawl, a thrice-yearly event that I co-organized with Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Jackie Risley. We got together 100 or so people and mobbed every bookstore in a particular neighborhood, eating chocolate between bookstore stops. Post-COVID, it hasn't felt like a very safe activity, but I really hope we can bring it back soon. I also really want to start doing Writers With Drinks, or something like it, again soon. For now, the only real-world community-building activity I'm doing is the monthly Trans Nerd Meet Up at an outdoor location in San Francisco. Few things make me as happy as helping to create a space where people can discover each other.
Anyway, social media conflates self-promo and community-building, for a lot of people, and this drains a lot of the joy out of the latter for me. For those of us who have something to sell, there are no clean motives on the Birb app, any more than on Insta or TikTok or whatever.
So I'm going to be thinking a lot about how I can do more things to build community that have nothing to do with also building my Brand as an Author. (I'm enjoying helping to make the Our Opinions Are Correct Discord server a chill, friendly place, though you do have to support OOAC on Patreon to join.) I'm also going to think more about how to promote myself and my work, in a way that feels both sustainable and somewhat separated from making friends and creating shared spaces for neat people.
Okay, so that was my three random disconnected thoughts about Twitter. As a reward for making it all the way to the bottom, here are some pictures of birds I've taken over the past few years:
