I quit Twitter.

For a few weeks, at least

I shut down my Twitter account on Friday. For a few weeks, at least. (If I don’t turn it back on within a month, it goes away for good.)

And to be honest, I feel a little sick to my stomach deactivating my 15-year-old Twitter account, even if it’s temporary. Everything I’ve learned — and preached for years — is that reporters need to be on Twitter. There’s no better place to find sources, get ideas or promote your own work. Twitter got me my first jobs in journalism. And it can be wildly, uproariously entertaining, whether you’re the one making the jokes or laughing at them.

All of those things are still possible! Twitter remains the social network with the most active journalists and the wittiest users. It’s still a great rolodex.

But it’s quickly becoming less helpful and more chaotic, thanks to a bunch of changes in recent months under Elon Musk.¹ And I’ve grown queasy watching Twitter executives abruptly ban reporters, suddenly change site policies and invent ways to mock news outlets. Who knows what’s next?

Being a reporter on Twitter right now feels a bit like being a frog in a pot. I have friends who vent that the situation seems steadily worse, but aren’t ready to jump out.

I’m not sure I want to permanently quit either. But I’m ready to reassess the site’s value and role in my life.

While Twitter’s problems are no secret …

Reflections on the life (and death?) of Twitter

I haven’t seen someone like me explain what Twitter’s decline means, practically, for a working reporter at a mainstream outlet. So let me try.

At its peak, Twitter regularly drove thousands of clicks to stories that I posted at Politico and later at The Washington Post. There were months where my tweets averaged more than 1 million impressions per day, putting my writing in front of readers and potential sources, plus editors and reporters across my industry. People used Twitter to find me and give me tips, good ones, multiple times per week. Sometimes TV and radio bookers called, asking me to go on their programs — not because I’d written an article, but because they’d seen my tweets about a topic.

Twitter was professionally very helpful, and I seemed pretty good at it — perhaps the only time that anyone was going to put me on the same list with industry titans like Jake Tapper and Maggie Haberman. The site helped make my career.

Those days have wound down, at least for me. Like many reporters, after years of steady growth, I’ve seen my follower count shrink under Musk as users abandon the service. Traffic from the site — both the impressions on my tweets and then the clicks to subsequent stories — has been a fraction of what it used to be, whether because of algorithmic changes, less interest in what I’m writing about, or most likely, some combination.

When I put up a goodbye tweet on Friday, which I left up for about three hours before deleting my account, it got about 5,100 views, mostly in the first hour.

Getting 5,100 views on a tweet is not nothing! But in a world where I'd accumulated 157,000-plus Twitter followers, that means at least 97 percent of accounts that followed me never saw my goodbye tweet.²

That goodbye tweet also provoked just 10 interactions — eight replies and two retweets — underscoring my hunch that engagement on the site has generally declined. A similar post that I put up on Friday on Mastodon, a rival social network that doesn’t use algorithms to decide what people see, got better engagement despite having far fewer followers there.

The removal of “verified” checkmarks this past week and the algorithmic elevation of anyone who paid $8 for Twitter Blue was the most recent development to make the service worse for reporters: It quickly became that much harder to find sources and confirm accurate information.³

It also sparked the latest round of Twitter users obsessing over Elon Musk, tweeting about him and fighting with him. That’s no surprise; as Jack Shafer writes, Musk has mastered getting journalists to pay attention to him. But it makes for an increasingly unpleasant user experience, at least for me, and one that I think rewards Musk by giving him so much collective mindshare, even if most reporters are decrying him. The only way to win is not to play.

I plan to keep my Twitter account closed for at least two weeks, just to see how it goes. I’m curious and a little worried about it. What happens if I have a scoop to break? What happens if sources want to get in touch with me? How will I judge reaction to a story, without the immediate responses that Twitter would provide?

I think I can scratch some of that itch with Substack and spending some time on other social platforms, like my Mastodon account. But for years, Twitter has been the first app I opened every morning and the last thing I scrolled at night. I’ve spent my entire journalism career using and thriving with the site. It’s already been weird to go without it for a few days.

Although since deactivating my account, I still find myself mindlessly trying to open the app, and craving the dopamine hits it provides. Maybe that’s the best sign it’s time to take a break.

1. The magic of Twitter was that you could log on and be greeted with perspectives from smart, interesting people. You could curate your experience by following relevant accounts of your choice. Under Musk, I was increasingly seeing things I didn’t want from people I didn’t follow — the new “For You” tab serves up days-old viral videos, the equivalent of internet junk food — and I had to work harder to find the things I actually wanted to see.

2. I never expected all 157,000 accounts that followed me to see every one of my tweets right away; people aren’t all using Twitter at the same time, or reading every single tweet at once! But because Twitter has steadily shifted toward showing viral tweets and away from showing tweets to followers when they’re posted, it means that if a tweet doesn’t take off fast, it probably won’t take off at all.

3. I actually liked some of the benefits of Twitter Blue when I tried it out, and if it wasn’t bound up in the drama over verified checkmarks, I probably would have kept paying for it. But it’s no fun as a customer to feel like the CEO is insulting you into buying the product.

Trying out Twitter Blue