#14 Twitter and Me (2009–2024)

Like many other academics, I have stopped using Twitter. I haven’t properly transitioned to another social media platform because the energy required to re-build “an audience” exceeds what I can realistically engage with at this stage of my life. The need for it has also diminished for me compared to the past, especially as a young academic. Bluesky seems like a promising alternative, but I’ve yet to invest time in it, and I’m not sure I really want to. But since Twitter played a non-negligible role in my professional and, if I’m honest, personal life for about a decade, I thought it would be fitting to write a brief post-mortem of my relationship with it. At one point, I was a fairly intensive user; I had around 20,000 followers and a blue tick—back when it couldn’t simply be purchased. Now it sounds a bit like saying “I used to be big on VHS”, but I wanted to reflect on what Twitter brought me and what it took away.

If I recall correctly, I created my first Twitter account in 2009 but didn’t actively use it until 2012 or 2013. I’m old enough to remember life before social media and witnessed the arrival of Facebook in Europe, which I joined in the summer of 2007. Facebook certainly consumed a lot of time, but I primarily saw it as a tool to connect with people I already knew—initially colleagues, then family, and even distant relatives over time. It felt relatively organic in the way I used it. Unlike some, I didn’t use Facebook to engage publicly or accept friend requests from strangers; it was more of a low-cost way to stay connected within my circle.

Twitter, by contrast, served a different purpose. I joined it to follow news and updates from people I didn’t know personally but found interesting, and to occasionally share ideas or research with a broader audience. My follower count grew significantly after I published a blog post titled “Why Academia Resembles a Drug Gang.” Despite its somewhat clickbaity title, the piece delved into an analysis of the dualization of the academic job market. The blog went viral, and sharing it on Twitter brought me a substantial number of new followers.

As an academic, Twitter felt like a way to reach a wider audience more directly and immediately than traditional channels, such as newspaper op-eds, which often involved significant ...