Buh-bye!

That’s a very blank, colorless, bloodless, soulless, bureaucratic, rubber-stamp sort of notification, isn’t it? The Middle Ages had beautiful, lovingly hand-drawn illuminations; our age has this.

That’s what ADCO received today upon doing away with its account on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter (which is what I still call it, on the rare occasions when I mention it).

I got a call this morning from ADCO’s Lauren McAlexander. It seems ADCO is building a new website, and she and Lora Prill agreed there was no reason to have a link to this particular social medium any more. When I asked why, she said we hadn’t used it since 2019. Twitter was no longer strategically useful or effective for ADCO.

She reached out to me because the system was emailing me with a code that she needed to kill the account. Note the equally uninspiring email notifications below, the back-and-forth during several attempts to get in and ditch the account before we got through.

Why was I needed for that action? Because I used to do most of the Tweeting for ADCO. I’d sort of forgotten that until Lauren reminded me.

You may not know anyone, personally, who was as crazy about Twitter as I was. In 2009, went almost instantaneously from being a detractor of Twitter and all that social nonsense (I particularly thought it was a hoot when I first saw Andre Bauer’s MySpace page), to being an addict.

I still laughed at MySpace, grumbled that I was forced to deal with Facebook (because that’s where the masses were), was only briefly fascinated by Pinterest, turned up my nose at Instagram, and had no interest in TikTok or Snapchat.

But I was nuts about Twitter. It’s not just that it was an irresistible form to someone who started writing headlines for a living in 1975 — I was very much used to expressing things that way. It was also useful. There were people that I found I could reach more quickly with a Twitter DM than through other means. They checked Twitter that often, as did I.

I commented on everything happening, as it happened. I would live-tweet big political event, generally writing more than 30 tweets during a debate or major speech. I wrote haiku. Harking back to front-page-editor days in Wichita, I created the Virtual Front Page. I was named one of the Twitterati (and yeah, I get that that was kind of a joke on Corey’s part — Hey, look at the old guy tweeting! — but it pleased me).

Twitter was so straightforward and logical — the very latest Tweet among accounts you followed would be right there at the top, unlike the bewildering order of Facebook posts that made it hard to find something you had just been looking at. It was also relatively free of obvious ads.

Those things — the unmysterious ordering and lack of ads — started changing somewhat Before the Fall. I found that Tweets from accounts I read the most would appear at the top, regardless of when they were posted. I did not like that. Nor had I liked the move from the 140-character limit to 280. It’s like they were throwing discipline and artistry to the winds, with no respect for tradition. But I adjusted, remembering that I was maybe better at writing blurbs than headlines. (In my newspaper days, other editors would ask me to look over and write blurbs for projects I’d had nothing to do with; I just had a knack for summing up complicated content in a few lines.)

But what was most wonderful about Twitter was that everybody was there! That is, everybody in my world — journalists and politicos. And when I say they were there, I mean they were always there. There was always a party going on, of the 18th century salon variety — neverending interaction with smart people who knew their politics. It was addictive to a lot of people because of that, and as a result of that.

That’s not the case anymore, with a few exceptions. People have wandered away, and if I bother to look at the medium now, it can make me kind of pessimistic about the state of humanity. Not always, but a lot of the time.

I’ve tried alternatives. I signed up for — I have to pause here to remember the name of it — Bluesky right when it came out. It offered promise, but didn’t deliver because it never reached critical mass. I found a few Twitter friends there, but the energy was missing along with the numbers. The moment had passed for a medium such as this to really take off.

I’m not canceling my Twitter account. It’s still there if I need it to contact someone or whatever. But I don’t look at it on a daily or even weekly basis — when once I would do so multiple times in an hour.

I still smile when I look back and see myself with Joe back in 2018, there at the top of my feed. But then, after a glance or two, I move on. I have a lot of other things to do…

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