How to ‘Quiet Quit’ Elon Musk’s Twitter

Twitter has broken our brains, yet we cling to these shards and believe each new tweet may be the one that mends our gray matter. No one is more emblematic of broken brain syndrome than the Chief Twit himself, Elon Musk, who in 12 days of owning Twitter has dissolved the board, laid off half its employees, suggested inviting some back, flip-flopped on monetization plans , spread disinformation, and railed against his own advertisers, making decisions about Twitter’s future with the impulsiveness of tweets themselves. “Tiny talk is talk so small it feels like it’s coming from your own mind,” Musk fired off shortly past 10 pm last Thursday, a thought so deep it might have bubbled up from a fish-bowled dorm room.

Congratulations: We all live in Tiny Talk Town now, where all conversation is about Elon Musk. We don’t have to be here, in Tiny Talk Town. We all know it.

There are other places online that are a decent hang. But Twitter is unique, and its most fervent users are unlikely to leave en masse. And most of the knee-jerk “I’m outta here” reactions to Musk’s takeover aren’t that compelling, unless you’re a writer assigned to collate celebrity tweets.

The smarter move might be a slow burn instead of a pyrotechnic exit—a thoughtful, considered approach to quitting Twitter without quitting Twitter. Think of it as quiet quitting, but for social media. In the workplace, quiet quitting is rejecting the burden of going above and beyond, no longer working overtime in a way that enriches your employer but depletes your own metaphorical coffers.

On Twitter, it’s about not giving more to a platform than most people can expect to get back. If you want to stick around on this new Twitter—whatever it may become—you need to find a way to use it without it using you. A relatively small group of people power Twitter.

According to internal company research viewed by Reuters , heavy users who tweet in English “account for less than 10 percent of monthly overall users, but generate 90 percent of all tweets and half of global revenue. ” So active users are a noisy bunch, and it would be easy for, say, an electric car entrepreneur who follows a disproportionate number of extremely active “blue checks” on Twitter to mistake his own Twitter experience for everyone’s experience. (Same goes for journalists.

) In reality, nearly half of Twitter users tweet less than five times a month , and most of their posts are replies, not original tweets. They check in on current events or live sports or celebrity news, and then they go about their lives. They’re “lurkers.

” Lurking isn’t doomscrolling , a practice (and phrase) that took hold during the early days of the Covid pandemic, when many people found themselves stuck at home and grasping at info on social media. Choosing to lurk, to sit back and observe for a while, is basically a heuristic and simplistic approach to dealing with the complexity and chaos that is New Twitter. Check in on Elon Musk’s new toy, sure, then close your app or browser tab.

Send a tweet, then disengage. Keep one eye on it during basketball games. Use DMs if you have to, then direct those message threads elsewhere.

Save your most original thoughts for another time, another place. And for the love of God, don’t blindly take voting advice from Elon Musk. Twitter may be much smaller than other social media sites, but it plays an outsize role in public discourse.

It’s centralized: You log in and are torpedoed into one endless, messy timeline, where political and media elites chew over the agenda of the day. “While the future may indeed lie in a collection of more specialized, interconnected communities served by Mastodon, Discord, and others,” Chris Riley, senior fellow for internet governance at Tech Policy Press wrote last week , “Twitter will retain one great advantage: Centralized discovery and sharing are still very powerful services, and difficult to replicate in a more distributed system. ” Still, now’s the time to explore other social media services.

Mastodon is experiencing a rapid rise in users, as Twitter users flock to it . (Though it’s unclear how many people are still using Twitter, too—my guess is a lot. ) The project launched back in 2017 as a nonprofit, open-sourced network of self-hosted servers.

It mimics the microblogging timeline of Twitter and allows for likes and amplifications of posts; users can see posts both on their own local, server-specific timeline and on a broader “federated” timeline. If all that sounds confusing, that’s because it is. In order to sign up, you have to first choose a server, and the sign-up process is slow and buggy.

But right now Mastodon has the just-showed-up-to-the-party energy that Twitter lacks. As Justin Pot put it in WIRED’s timely guide , Mastodon is “what Linux would be like if it was a social network … The internet has become corporatized. It’s refreshing to use a service that hasn’t been A/B tested to death.

” Also see: BlueSky Social (backed by Jack Dorsey), Cohost, and Counter. There will be other attempts to build social networks that serve as a digital town square. Mass adoption will require at least some ease of use, plus cultural buy-in.

But in the year 2022, maybe an exact replica of Twitter isn’t what we really want, or what society really needs. As Mastodon user Chris Bides put it, “Most people probably shouldn’t want a Twitter replacement. Now is a good time to focus on what we actually like about internet interaction, and go from there.

” I happen to be a subscriber to the original version of Twitter’s premium tier, Blue, which means I’ve been paying $5 a month for access to features like being able to undo or edit tweets. Now, under Musk, Twitter Blue has morphed into an $8-a-month moving target, a service that offers blue-check verification for a fee. The rollout has been chaotic (you’ll notice repeat usage of this word).

On Saturday, Twitter was updated in Apple’s App Store with a note saying that users who sign up can receive the blue check “just like the celebrities, companies and politicians you already follow. ” Now the launch of Twitter Blue has reportedly been delayed until November 9, after the US midterm elections. Musk’s erratic moves suggest that identity verification, the serious preventative measures against impersonation, aren’t as much of a priority as some notion he has of democratizing the site.

And his preoccupation with the status conferred by blue check marks suggests he’s misunderstanding the value of content creators on a mostly free platform. But on the flip side, a 2020 study found that a subset of social media users would be willing to pay a subscription fee for social media and messaging services, provided that led to less data collection, better privacy protections, and less fake news and election manipulation. It’s just unclear if Musk’s version of Twitter Blue will offer any of this.

So: Don’t rush to pay for Twitter. Some people will choose to, and that’s fine. But it’s probably better to wait this one out and see what, if any, value is added.

Most of all, recognize that this new era of Twitter presents an opportunity: to determine what is actually good about social media, reexamine the protocols of the internet and the principles of online spaces, return to deeper work, maybe mend our broken brains, and strengthen our social ties in other places. Elon Musk’s Twitter is chaotic, destabilizing, and potentially more costly, and I don’t just mean the monthly fees. It’s a chance to take some time back.

Take it. .