Goodbye to All That, Twitter Edition

I should have left ages ago, back when Twitter became X and when, in January of 2023, the end of Book Twitter was officially declared. But I stayed, even when the new owner laid off 80 percent of the company and the site became unusable for many reasons both functional and ideological. I had put in too much time to let go so easily even after so many of my favorite follows had already gone and the bots had taken over.

I have been using—actively, so actively—the hellsite for well over a decade, and I’d built up a fairly big audience there. All of my hard work was supposed to pay off the week before the 2024 presidential election arrived when I finally got a link to pre-order my new book which comes out in July. Dare I say I was looking forward to bombarding my followers with self-promotion (but in a nice, totally self-aware way) after years of talking about other people’s books and keeping my head down?

So imagine my surprise when the final straw broke a week later, when we collectively realized that the man who ruined my beloved Twitter—the place where I met my husband 11 years ago when he slid into my DMs—would likely succeed in turning the platform into state media. It feels like a zillion years ago since the previous owner banned a boldly lying, misinformation-spreading politician from the site. Now his face was everywhere. It’s time to get out.

But can I indulge in some nostalgia for a moment? How I miss the early days of social media—the good old Tumblr days, the times when Goodreads was vibrant and fun before Amazon acquired it and drained the life out of it. In those days I could make meaningful connections with other people simply by sharing what I enjoyed. I could meet people on some platform, increasingly on Twitter, and then see them out at events and have them become my actual IRL friends. It felt like magic.

Which is not to say that Twitter was ever perfect or even close to it.

It was never true that authors simply had to have an active account on which they promoted their books and posted personal details about their lives in order to recruit an audience. Twitter was never an effective promotional tool for authors who didn’t want to be there. But it was a nice way to connect for those of us who like words more than images.

It was a way to kill time before the work day was over, a tool of procrastination that took away so many productive hours from my own writing. But it was also the place where rock icon Liz Phair followed me (!!!) and where I began to have conversations with so many of the writers I’d admired for ages. And after I said something negative about Donald Trump in 2015, it was also the place where I got attacked by masses of antisemites who threatened to murder me in a variety of creative ways.

Twitter allowed me to come into contact with a wide range of smart people who I wasn’t necessarily reading in traditional media, and they became my most trusted sources for news and for commentary. It was on Twitter where I first encountered line-by-line dissection of articles from mainstream press outlets showing how individual word choices, particularly in headlines, illustrated a variety of media biases. Access to these voices made me a better reader, a more critical thinker. I will always be grateful.

Which is not to say that some of the sillier stuff was any less important. In Book Twitter I found a community among other people who also care about Big Important Book Dramas (I’m kidding), the latest thinkpieces and the deal announcements. We talked about salary and working conditions and did some organizing. There were also many goofy memes.

Is the Literary Internet dead? It’s tempting to say so. And yet the books keep coming. As book coverage continues to be less and less valued in traditional press outlets, we will need new places to talk about them (for me, it’s preferable to find a place that doesn’t require self-video skills).

Like so many people over the last month, I’ve recently migrated back to Bluesky after having been dormant for a while. It’s been a pleasure to reconnect with people I’d lost track of on other platforms and begin to have a little bit of fun again. In the midst of the world burning I hope the book and media people on Bluesky will find the space to make fun of this piece—it’s trite, it’s navel-gazy, it’s been done to death, it’s trivial. I’m just glad there’s a place with less noise and more engagement to do it. Maybe we can start anew there.