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Yes indeed. I see it is time for your 10th annual “I’m quitting Twitter” moment. (Already, the FT’s senior editors are limbering up to inform me that house style requires us to refer to the site as X.com, or X, as per its new name, but that simply doesn’t work as a statement of intent. If I tell you that I am quitting X, you will just assume that I haven’t quite decided what to quit yet and will simply be filling in the X at a later moment.)
Furthermore, no one who is about to qwit calls it X. If you do, then you are probably still happy with the place and would not be leaving. So it is Twitter we are leaving, although, of course, if you were foolish enough to ask why, we would tell you that, actually, Twitter left us some time ago. Incidentally, don’t under any circumstances ask anyone why they are leaving Twitter, because they’ll tell you, and it won’t be in fewer than 140 characters. In any case, you don’t need to ask, because they are going to tell you whether you do or not.
But the question is: is it finally time to quit? Elon Musk has given us a few more reasons to go. He’s let Donald Trump and Tommy Robinson back in, says civil war is inevitable in the UK and was jolly rude about Sir Keir Starmer.
So by all means quit, but let’s be clear: you can’t just leave. You have to proclaim your departure, probably at great length, explaining how it was once the greatest party on Earth, but now it is full of nasty rightwing riffraff or furious leftwing riffraff or riffraff with no discernible political views, but who are still furious and nasty in some other way.
The good news is that you could do it on Twitter. “Oyez, oyez, oyez (isn’t that the new congestion charge?), on the 24th day of August, the honourable whoever you are, boasting 25,000 followers, at least 4,000 of whom are not bots, has decided to quit this sphere. He/she will slink back some time in September.”
But you are simply not allowed to go without the long, heartfelt goodbye. The last post needs to talk about how much you loved the place, the good friends you made, the gossip, how central it was to your life . . . but that now it is even more awful than it was when you chose not to notice all the racism, misogyny and insane bullying. You cannot just slope away quietly. You must declaim.
There are many excellent models of the last letter before you leave Twitter, but can I recommend my own version from 2011, or perhaps the one from 2015 (or was it 2017?), though the last one at least recognised that I would probably give in and return before too long. It is not enough simply to tell your followers where to find you in future, so just forget for a moment that you are not Taylor Swift and that no one cares what social media you use and that we all think you will be back. Put your whole heart into it. It’s time for your “I had a dream” post.
I did toy with departing again when Musk took over. Several of my Twitter pals (I know I should call them X pals but that might imply we have fallen out) announced they were off to a site called Mastodon. I did take a look and reserved a Mastodon name but it was immediately obvious that the site was rubbish, unnecessarily nerdy and would never take off in the way Twitter had. I then looked at Facebook Threads and reserved a name but it was immediately obvious that the site was rubbish, insufficiently nerdy and would never take off in the way Twitter had. Nowadays, there is Blue Sky, which is full of people I agree with but much smaller, less informative and mostly very polite, and where’s the fun in that?
Anyway, what could be better than watching fanatical idiots enraging each other and knowing that you don’t care who loses. This is the digital equivalent of bear-baiting except without sympathy for the bear.
It’s true that X’s bonehead-per-capita ratio is depressingly high but then that’s true of a lot of places these days. Have you ever watched Love Island? X is now a cesspool of racism, misogyny and rage but, again, there have to be some alternatives to the Daily Mail.
So look, go if you want but be sure to make a meal of your departure. Draw it out, or in other words, Elongate it.
Email Robert at [email protected]
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