Farewell (and Good Riddance) to a Bygone Era of Twitter

I’ve essentially quit Twitter/X, and my life is better for it.

I joined the platform in 2008 as a young journalist hoping to gather sources, crowdsource ideas, promote my work, and listen to some of the sharpest minds in my field think out loud. It helped with all of those things, a bit. But as I moved out of full-time journalism, my time on the site turned from commenting and conversing to passive consumption. Doomscrolling, as it came to be known. 

Like so many others, I came to realize that Twitter was making me more anxious, more distractible, and, if I’m being honest, more partisan. It offered a cacophony of voices–funny, insightful, playful, banal–all jumbled together. But its structure rewards the voices that are loudest, angriest, most clever, most cutting, most certain, and often the most obnoxious. One of my most visceral reactions to the 2016 election was the sense that I needed to change my relationship with social media. All of this scrolling wasn’t making me a better citizen, writer, parent, husband, friend, or any of the other roles I care about.

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has only supercharged the toxicity. Others have tracked how the billionaire has catered to the most conspiratorial and unhinged voices in public life, degrading the site for all the people who found kinship and likeminded community on it. I’ve returned to the site a bit recently to take in the exuberant energy surrounding Kamala Harris, Dad Walz, and the DNC with its 50 musical states. But I can find those memes elsewhere. On Twitter, they mostly underscore how dreary the site is most of the time.

So, good riddance.

But on my way out, I want to celebrate one phenomenon from Twitter’s heyday: The rise of single-serving accounts, or accounts that do one particular thing, often offering surprise, insight, or simple fun. There are countless such accounts (and plenty of cynical copycats too). I’d like to praise three in particular. 

The first, Frog and Toad Bot, posts automated excerpts from the children’s book series by Arnold Lobel. Without any setup or context, it offers charming little quotes from the gentle adventures of two amphibious friends: “Toad said, ‘Frog, you are looking quite green.’ ‘But I always look green,’ said Frog. ‘I am a frog.’“

The soothing tones of Lobel’s prose stand in contrast to the overcaffeinated energy on the rest of the site. It is, as they say online, a palette cleanser. When images from the books appear, they have the same effect: soft watercolor hues that convey warmth and detail. The books feature stories about friendship, conflict resolution, and the joys of bringing tea to a friend in bed. It’s a testament to the author’s voice that essentially any quote pulled from the books carries the same spirit and tone.

My second example is also a neat trick of automation. Random Restaurant pulls data from Google restaurant reviews from around the world, posting an address, a rating, and a few images. One post might show breaded cutlets and fries from Mega Grill in Bor, Serbia; another a prawn platter from SYM Cafe & Catering in Beira, Mozambique; another biryani from IRCTC Food Plaza in Bihar, India. Most photos are user-generated, so they vary in quality: slightly-out-of-focus burgers, inviting outdoor patios, a dog beneath a table, a banquet hall set for a wedding. Along with the food, you get glimpses of regional architecture, fashion, and hairstyles. The account scrapes data from restaurants upscale, downscale, and everything in between, chain places and local joints. It’s an avenue into timeless truths: The diversity of flatbreads around the world is truly astounding; leafy vegetables rarely get top billing; and, deep down, we all seem to really love fried potatoes.

Lastly, and closer to home, I’ve appreciated Midwestern Modern, an account by photographer Josh Lipnik, who travels extensively around the American Midwest capturing post offices, theatres, storefronts, bus stations, banks, and other built forms with midcentury (or earlier) origins. He’s not the first architectural photographer to use symmetry to strong effect, or the first to chronicle the visual idioms of rural Americana. But there’s something appealing about the way his compositions seem to say, “Stop, take a moment to notice this particular building in this particular town that you might so easily rush past.”

It’s been said that social media decontextualizes everything, or displaces it from a larger story. You might log on looking for a family member’s vacation photos and find instead an old classmate’s political opinionizing, or vice versa. That causes all sorts of problems, but in the case of these Twitter accounts, it’s what makes them work. Frog and Toad Bot surprises and delights precisely because it appears beside a pharmaceutical ad or a friend venting about their flight delay.

There are countless more examples out there. And there are equally inventive creative expressions taking form on platforms like TikTok and YouTube, and on and on and on. What I appreciate is that even in noisy-ugly-imperfect conditions, creative folks find ways to invite us to attention.