Compassionate Network Erosion and the Broken Place2025-01-09

I've never had a lot of followers. I don't have a "brand." I've never seen Twitter as part of my job. Over the years, I've live-tweeted events, shared news stories, made a few attempts at wit, dabbled in commentary, and had some rewarding conversations. In 2019, I stumbled across a tweet broadcasting that a silly, dance-walking forest bird called a woodcock had been spotted in Bryant Park. That experience led me to become a birder, giving me a hobby and community that provided a lifeline during pandemic lockdown.

When I signed up in 2007, Twitter was a mostly silly blend of three big trends — blogging, texting, and MySpace. Its emphasis on the banal and ephemeral felt like a parody of internet communication that could only serve to bemuse eye-rolling older relatives. A few years later, it had transformed into the important social network, where global events, activism, and intellectual discourse were playing out in real time. Thanks to its popularity among journalists, twenty-word "hot takes" from random Twitter users were making the news. It became my primary social network, and despite all its flaws — the trolls, the reflexive outrage, the harassment, the hit-or-miss content moderation — my experience of Twitter since then has been almost entirely positive.

But Twitter is dead, killed in a classic body swap, and its replacement is not my cup of tea. Its transformation into X has been well documented, as have the complicated feelings of people like me who find that the platform they've put energy into has turned into something quite different. Each effort to post on X makes me uneasy not because of the users or any specific posts that I see, but because of its model of governance: concentrate power, ban critics, use the legal system against academics, control narratives, change rules to suit the owner's mood, target whistleblowers, promote cronies, weaken tools to find reliable information, sell influence, and use the global nature of the site to help other authoritarians (such as leaders of countries where the owner's other business interests may be at stake) to suppress political dissent. The prospect of participating in such a system — of being a small part of its revenue stream — leaves a bitter taste I can't ignore.

The question is: what is a disaffected former Twitter user to do? The standard options for consumers when the quality of a product or service degrades are to remain loyal, use voice to try to effect change, or exit. Loyalty isn't relevant in this case as a change in ownership is the source of the degradation. Voice implies a company that adheres to expected financial rationalities (to make as much money as possible, and thereby to retain as many users as possible). Twitter's effort to cultivate a quasi-healthy discursive space over the years wasn't driven by altruism, after all, but by the pursuit of profit. Even so-called "alt-tech" sites like Gab, Parler, or BitChute, which cater to an explicitly right-wing clientele, are in it to make money and thus try to retain their users. It is tempting to see X as an emergent alt-tech platform or as an experiment to Disrupt™ traditional social media business models, but increasingly it appears more like a mutation of a business into a toy for one person and his friends.

With loyalty and voice off the table, the only remaining option is exit, but it's not so easy. First of all, it feels cowardly. If everyone like me left, we'd risk leaving behind yet another echo chamber or creating one of our own, further contributing to a polarized culture. There may be something virtuous about "staying with the trouble," as Donna Haraway put it, sticking it out when reality gets uncomfortable rather than looking for an escape from a shared reality. The problem is, we're not just talking about a challenging space but a fundamentally broken place. Staying with the trouble assumes the conditions are sufficient for there to be the capacity for mutual growth, but I don't think X can provide that to me.

When we sign up for a platform like Twitter, there are features, rules, systems, and potential, but it's only through interactions, shared histories, dumb jokes, and photos of birds that the space is filled with meaning and becomes a place — a distinction that comes from the field of human geography. In the case of Twitter, it's not just a place, but a home on the internet, a site of belonging and identity. The unmaking of place — the erosion of our "rooted" feeling — is a disorienting experience, especially when social ties and histories remain technically intact. The competing desires to exit and persist have resulted in paralysis and avoidance.

But it's hard to leave. Twitter is where my people are, after all. Over the years, when I wanted to connect with a friend, colleague, classmate, or relative, I used Twitter. It's where I chose to build my network, and even found new communities in the process. In short, I'm still there because all of you are still there.

"Network effects" is an economic term that's come up an awful lot lately as we collectively grapple with the relationship between social media and mental health, and with the concentration of our public sphere in a handful of sites owned by for-profit companies. At its most basic, a network effect is when the value of a product or service increases as more people use it. In the age of surveillance capitalism, a platform like Facebook, TikTok, or Twitter is more valuable when more people use it because that means not just eyeballs on advertisements but a larger pool of user data.

Individual users feel network effects, too: we're drawn to a new platform for a variety of reasons, but what keeps us hanging around is often the connections we've made. The more of my people who use a given platform, the more value it has to me. When it comes time to evaluate the decision to exit, network effects are exacerbated by our tendency to weigh potential losses as greater than equivalent gain. When network effects make the perceived cost of leaving too great, you experience platform lock-in.

We derive value from connections in our network, but we also contribute to it. That's true of our relationship with the company that owns the site, but it's also true of our relationship to the people we follow. Even if I decide to exit and stop providing my teeny tiny bit of value to X, my past activity and my metadata linger behind — a ghost, quantified in your perceived audience and contributing to your feelings of connection to your network. I'm still part of the warm and fuzzy feeling you get when you look at your follower count and post something, even though I'll never see it.

So I'm still here because all of you are still here, but what if you're still here because I'm still here? What if we're trapped in some kind of social gravity well, each contributing to the mass of the network, making it harder for each other to break free? To weaken the pull of network effects, we have to shrink the network — my friends and colleagues would have to choose to exit, and I would have to be aware of their exit.

In computing terms, network erosion is what happens when the structure or performance of a network degrades over time. Maybe the hardware is outdated or maybe there's not enough bandwidth, but it just doesn't run like it used to. Socially, it means the weakening of relationships and social structures. It's like losing touch with your high school friends when you go off to college. It's typically something we want to avoid, but what if connections in a network all want to leave, but network effects keep them tethered in place?

I am proposing a productive kind of network erosion — weakening bonds as an act of kindness and, collectively, as an act of liberation. The locus of our control may seem small, but the mass of an object doesn't have to reduce to zero before its gravitational pull is sufficiently diminished to allow others to break free. It just has to hit a critical threshold, and once connections start disappearing, cascading effects reduce that threshold for others in the network.

So I'm unfollowing my friends. I'm unfollowing them even though it hurts to disconnect from people I like. If they want to go, I don't want my little piece of their networks to contribute to their decision to stick around. So I'm not just leaving -- I'm making a scene as I head for the door, pinging each and every one of them as I click unfollow. This is a boycott, but not of X — it's not fueled by outrage or demands, and X doesn't care if I stay or go. I'm boycotting my individual connections on X. For many of the people I follow, this will be a meaningless gesture — I'm not under the impression that I'll spark a mass exodus — but for a few, maybe the small nudge of compassionate unfollowing is enough to reevaluate their relationship with the site.

Lately, I've found myself frequently thinking of the Serenity Prayer, that old invocation for "the serenity to accept the things I can't change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." X is out of my control, and I don't have the power to move my friends elsewhere. But this holiday season, I can gift everyone on my Twitter list one small thing: an awareness of my absence, and with that, perhaps a sliver of agency.

Place matters. Sometimes staying with the trouble means putting in the work of building a new place for communication and connection. Or several places. I'm experimenting with Bluesky, but trying to be more thoughtful about contingency and control. There are a lot of unknowns, and a lot of people I miss, but at least now I don't feel queasy every time I post something. For now, at least, the structure itself feels invisible except for the people, which is exactly how a social network should feel (even if I know that no platform is truly neutral). Maybe we can construct a place together, and in our migration we can free our networks to do the same. As for the bird photos, I started uploading them with Wikimedia Commons years ago — another home on the internet, governed not by profit or the whims of a billionaire but by user-created principles. Here's that Bryant Park woodcock again.