February 3rd, 2021 marks the 12th anniversary of the day I joined Twitter. When I saw Twitter’s tastefully-designed “12” in my notifications tab, I had one overriding thought, which I characteristically tweeted:
A Twitter anniversary is a terrible thing for me. I joined the service when I was 13 years old. For the sake of historical context, we were about two weeks into Barack Obama’s first presidential term, Gordon fucking Brown was still British Prime Minister, Netflix’s biggest business was DVD rentals, and the first pandemic of my lifetime—remember Swine Flu?—was still a few months out.
All of this means it’s the home of an embarassing amount of cringe-inducing teenage Tweets (highlights of which I collected into a thread here), but it’s also a platform that’s shaped my life — for better or worse.
Here’s a few of my big takeaways from 12 years on Twitter.
The platform has changed — mostly for the worse
Not the spiciest take, I know, but hear me out. The day after I joined Twitter, under the cringe-inducing-but-anonymous handle of @linuxfanboy1, the biggest news story to emerge from social media was Stephen Fry getting stuck in a lift.
Could you imagine waking up in 2021, checking Twitter, and seeing the biggest topic was “celebrity gets stuck in lift”? It’d be like living on another planet. Thing is, though, there’s a direct link between #frylift and the garbage fire of a platform Twitter is now.
We were only just starting to realise it in 2009, but there’s enormous power in being able to broadcast your thoughts on every single issue to several million (or, in Fry’s case, several hundred thousand) people in real time. Whether that remains something innocent or becomes literally apocalyptic depends, mostly, on the people in charge of the platform, and hoo boy has Twitter done an awful job.
Twitter’s leadership was more than happy to let the likes of Katie Hopkins, Graham Linehan, Alex Jones, and Donald Trump spew lies and hatred in the direction of millions of people on its platform, so long as the ad revenue kept rolling in and the stock price kept investors on board. In doing so, it’s contributed to the toxic online environment of 2021, where facts don’t matter and everything is either deified or literal cancer with zero nuance in the middle.
Modern Twitter is exhausting (but you can fix it)
I found Twitter completely inaccessible last summer. It really felt like everything had reached boiling point; between the Black Lives Matter protests, lockdown rule-breakers, JK Rowling pumping out virulent transphobia, and the endless, incessant tweeting of Donald Trump, there was palpable rage with every scroll.
All of it was valid, of course, and I’m glad people spoke out, but I would often come out of the Twitter app feeling on the cusp of a panic attack. It was overwhelming, and I took my first proper Twitter hiatus over the summer.
When I came back, I set myself harsh limits. I cut the accounts I was following from just over 350 to 90, muted more vocal accounts, vowed never to hit triple figures again, installed the Intention browser extension, and looked to take at least two hiatuses a year (I’m at peace with the fact that I can’t just leave it, for reasons I’ll explain in a second).
The platform feels like way less of a drain on my mental health this way — though frankly, it’s damning that I have to implement that many restrictions to stay there.
After all this time, I’m probably stuck with it
Some of my favourite people are folks I met on Twitter as a teen. We’ve all gotten older; our lives have changed, and we’ve shared some great things with each other. We’ve embarked on creative endeavours together (RIP, Blue Sun). We’ve put up with every dumb API change, every algorithmically-generated feature, and every terrible explanation for why the platform can’t just ban its nazis.
We’ve also lived through history; through three presidential and four general elections, through Super Bowls and Premier League titles, famous deaths, and countless breaking news events.
To take myself away from that would be heartbreaking. Jack Dorsey and co. have me hook, line, and sinker: Twitter is the landlord of the house my friends and I live in, and I can’t stop paying them rent.
OKAY SO THIS IS A LOT ALREADY I KNOW but there’s some reasoning behind it. 2009 Avery was just as into tech as 2021 Avery is, but hadn’t quite figured out how to control their hyperfocuses. Also, my mum was… really not keen for me to join social media, mostly out of TV news-induced fear that I’d wind up being seduced by a paedophile. Finally, I think the anonymity made me okay with talking about myself, which feels like a distinctly millenial thing — it also made it less likely for my Mum to find out, though she did, really quickly.