we need idea-sharing networks outside social networks

Twitter has been one of my favourite internet things for close to a decade now because of its ability to expose me to voices from outside my own network. Unlike Facebook, which was built around ‘friends’ and following and be followed by strangers feels weird, Twitter is much more oriented towards interacting with people you’ve never met.

For myself, that’s been incredibly valuable. I’ve learned from Black and Indigenous voices, from women sharing stories of experiencing sexual violence and everyday sexism, from scientists writing about their research. It has, I think, made me more empathetic and certainly less likely to assume my personal experiences are in any way universal.

The irony of this is that for many of the people I’ve learned from, the experience has been the opposite. As they share their personal experiences they get notice from people who want to argue with them, to tell them they’re wrong, and to engage in harassment campaigns aimed at shutting them down.

In the past year this has resulted in a number of people leaving the service, either permanently or temporarily. Ta-Nehishi Coates quit in December after being accused of “fetishizing white supremacy”. Lindy West, whose work on the way we talk about fat is among the most worldview-altering writing I’ve experienced, wrote an op-ed this month about how liberating it was to have deactivated her account. And this past week I became aware that two Canadian thinkers who I became aware of via Twitter– Robert Jago and Vicky Mochama– had left the service (both have said it was their own choice to step back).

All of this has made me realize I’ve become too dependent on the service to regularly expose me to smart writing. If I come across someone who makes good points, I hit “follow” but I’m less likely to visit their website, buy their book or subscribe to their column. I’m trying to change that. I’ve reactivated an RSS service (remember RSS? No? You should read this then) and am being more diligent about subscribing to people who have blogs or columns. I’m also trying to do more of my own thinking and writing outside of social media silos and posting them on here (this marks two weeks straight of a new post every day).

I hope others do the same. I’m not advocating for the downfall of Twitter, but if smart and diverse voices are leaving it because they find the harms outweigh the goods, than the value of the service disappears for me, too. Though they don’t owe me anything, presumably people signed up for Twitter to an extent because they wanted to share their ideas and follow other people’s ideas. If the existing social networks aren’t going to be a good place for that, then we need to adopt the infrastructure for networks outside of them.

PS. I am currently trying out the service microblog, largely because I think the thinking behind it recognizes the value centralized networks like Facebook and Twitter offer in terms of community while at the same time looking to learn from their mistakes by setting it up so everyone within the network is an independent owner of their own site. I have no idea if it will succeed.

PPS. I very much related to this post on Vice about blogs which includes the line “the best blogs of our generation are being wasted in tweetstorms, Facebook rants, and reddit comments.”