New Nov 27, 2024

Goodbye, Twitter.

Top Front-end Bloggers All from Brad Frost View Goodbye, Twitter. on bradfrost.com

Here’s how you can find and follow me:

It’s difficult to express just how important and meaningful Twitter was to my life and career. I’m sad to leave it behind, but I have to now.

It was always fun when Twitter would come up in conversation with outsiders; the joke was always “it’s just a bunch of people sharing what sandwiches they’re eating for lunch.” Yuk yuk yuk. Inevitably, I’d chime in with “Yeah so I’ve made so many real-life friends and owe pretty much all of my professional success to Twitter.” They’d be surprised and curious to learn more.

It’s difficult to articulate exactly what Twitter was and what made it special. I used it as my water cooler, a place to make friends and build connections, a place to share my thoughts and writing, a place to learn, a place to keep up with the latest and greatest, a place to get recommendations, a place to drum up new business, a place to hold meaningful conversations, a place to make stupid jokes. It was this bizarre world that blended personal and professional, serious and funny, high-brow and low-brow. I truly feel like I could be my authentic self there.

I’ve made so many dear friends because of Twitter. It still blows my mind that I have friends — good friends! — from all over the world because of this website. It’s magic every time I meet a Twitter friend in real life, which continues to happen to this day.

I joined Twitter on Jan 4th, 2008. Right out of the gate, I had some really important things to say:

Over time, I learned the ropes and began connecting with fellow web designers and developers. Twitter was indispensable during the early mobile & responsive design days; it truly felt like we were figuring out things in real-time together. Blogging fed discussion on Twitter which fed blogging which fed discussion on Twitter. It was a great feedback loop, and a healthy community emerged as a result.

Over the last 17 years, I amassed over 130,000 followers, found myself on many “top designers you should follow” lists, and regularly participated in the zeitgeist and hot drama of the day. It became an extension of myself and a regular part of my day.

I can’t believe I have to give it all up, but here we are.

Holding out hope

My livelihood heavily depends on my online presence; there’s always been a direct connection between my Twitter presence and our client work at Big Medium, conferences, and work opportunities. Walking away from a following of 130,000 that I spent 15 years growing is extremely hard and painful. Scary, really! We’re doing really exciting at Big Medium and I want to be able to connect with clients who could use our help. And that’s to say nothing about all of the personal relationships I’ve built and want to maintain.

That’s why I continued holding out hope. When Ol’ Musky‘s takeover occurred I was in the midst of yet-another personal crisis, so I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to jump ship or make any hasty decisions. As time progressed and Ol’ Musky continued its disembowelment of Twitter, I continued to hold out hope that he’d get bored, would run it into the ground, and someone would swoop back in and put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Maybe that will still happen one day. But for now, it’s being actively weaponized by horrible people so I can’t be there anymore. It’s time to walk away. I respect other peoples’ decision to delete their accounts or delete all of their tweets, but I’m not going to do that. Part of me is still holding out hope, but at a more practical level my Twitter activity is heavily woven into my blog and many other publications. I want to preserve URIs.

Where to now?

Of course, Twitter isn’t the only platform around, and I participate in many others. I haven’t quite found the Twitter-like groove with any of them yet (aside from sharing on my own site), but I truly want to recapture even a flicker of the old Twitter spirit. Here’s where you can find me; feel free to reach out and say hey!

Whew! That’s a lot of places. I’m going to participate where I can and see if I can keep up, but over time I’ll likely to make some commitments and narrow my focus a bit.

It’s not lost on me that more than at any other point in history our relationships to each other are sculpted by the whims of a handful of commercial companies. I continue to own my own presence on my own website, and want to do some work to beef up my Indie Web self a bit.

Goodbye, Twitter

So now it’s time to say goodbye to the place that’s given me so much. Thank you for all you’ve done for me. I realize I’m talking to a ghost here, but the sentiment holds.

I’ll end this post with some of my favorite/most popular tweets, so here they are:

Work hard. Don't be an asshole. Share what you know.
Scroll to top