I’m Done With Twitter, but Not for the Reasons You Might Think

There are a lot of people walking away from Twitter — X, as it wants to be known now — and making grand statements as they exit. The recent election and Elon Musk’s corresponding partisan leanings have accelerated the exodus of Team Blue, to the point where participation on X has become a tribal signal in the same way one’s preferred cable news network became two decades ago. Twitter is Team Red and Bluesky is Team Blue. Yuck.

I’ve mostly left the room, kind of a slow exit, over the past few months. Strong Towns, the organization, has pulled back substantially, as well. I want to explain why because it’s for different reasons than the partisan divide (although that doesn’t help).

When Cheech purchased Twitter at 54.20 a share, he got the wacky weed crowd buzzing — as if they needed help — but I admit to being optimistic about the shift. I married a real journalist three decades ago and have kind of a maximalist free-speech mindset, particularly when it comes to government coercion. The Twitter Files bother me a lot. The platform has a right to regulate content (as Strong Towns does on our site), but it should not be pressured, especially privately and especially under threat, to do so by regulatory arms of the government.

So, when Musk said he was going to clean up bots, allow users to check factual claims, and build a real global community free of government coercion in the U.S. as well as in less welcoming places like Russia, China and Iran, I signed up and paid my monthly fee. Even though I’ve called Musk the P.T. Barnum of our age, this felt like a more honest business model, one I could support.

Sadly, I no longer feel this way.

Bro, That’s So Rad!

I have two brothers and no sisters. I grew up on a farm with my beleaguered mom as the only woman in my life. My wife and I married in 1995 and have two daughters, the youngest of whom is a high school senior. It took me a little while, but I learned the toilet lid rule.

I’m not being pithy. The toilet lid rule applies to way more than toilets; it’s a framing for a good marriage and a healthy society. In a world where I don’t put the toilet lid down, it doesn’t impact me, but it does impact my wife and daughters. Yet, it costs me practically nothing to put the toilet lid down. Ever since that was pointed out to me, I recognize that it is a basic courtesy to the women of the household.

In the early days of Strong Towns, our audience was almost all men. This isn’t surprising. I was producing nearly all of the content. I’m a dude. I was writing with a dude framing. My stuff was on a site that I — an engineer — designed with the logic of an engineer. Everything about it was communicating clearly to men. Women had to work harder for the same access. They had to lower the lid.

We got serious about this problem in 2015. The early advice I received was that I needed to write about things women care about, as if women don’t care about whether their city is going broke but do care about parks, flowers and long walks. I thought this was not only stupid (and sexist) but wrong. Fortunately, I received more helpful advice about how we design our site, headline our articles and frame our content to be more welcoming to women. We used to A/B test a lot of our stuff for gender reaction (it’s more difficult to do today for a variety of frustrating and sadly ironic reasons), which helped us to identify the subtle differences that got us closer to a 50:50 audience split.

I say this because the shift from Twitter to X goes in the opposite direction. Twitter was accessible. Its vibe was not overtly male nor was it coded female. The logo was a bird, colored a softish blue but with smooth edges. This toilet seat is down. X, in contrast, has a Stasi kind of vibe to it. Male, powerful, with sharp lines and hard edges. It’s very bro vibes, almost exclusively so.

At Strong Towns, we’re in the business of communicating ideas. We need to reach elected officials, technical professionals and local leaders. A huge percentage of our target audience is female. Our analysis has always suggested that Twitter’s borderline aggressive back-and-forth style, where anyone can jump in on any conversation, is a toilet-lid-up kind of attribute. The rebranding to X reinforced all these apprehensions for me and our project.

Stay on the Platform (or Become Irrelevant)

The early days of social media were amazing for organizations like Strong Towns. Our insights were too far outside of the mainstream back then for traditional media to spend much time with them, but we could reach a ridiculous number of people through sites like Facebook and Twitter. This was especially true when we grew enough to have an advertising budget.

We could pay to share our message with women — heck, in the early days, we could even target racial minorities — and get direct feedback on where we were resonating, what mattered most and how to understand their experiences in a Strong Towns context. For an engineer/planner from a small town in Minnesota, one with a focused mission and a mind open to learning, this was incredibly illuminating.

And in those early days, we could write an article, share it on Twitter, and then, when people found it helpful and clicked on it, they would bounce to our site. The platforms have not only changed their ad targeting but they also actively stifle anything with an outside link. The goal is to keep everything on the platform.

Let me say: As unhelpful as this is for us, I get the strategy. We have worked to play along, even though it is more effort for less return. And we do this even though Twitter/X has stopped providing the kind of analytics that we find strategically helpful from a messaging standpoint. And we do this even though Twitter’s algorithm has stopped rewarding followers and started favoring viral content.

We can deal with all of these changes, and we were dealing with all of these changes, but we can’t when it’s mixed with what else the platform wants us to do.

Are You Ready To Rumble?

Lots of people call social media a sewer. I get that — I think Jonathan Haidt is largely correct on this — but, when you are doing advocacy media, you need to go where the people are. We’ve been really open about our strategy and how we avoid partisanship, demonization, clickbait that doesn’t deliver, and other high-growth, low-credibility approaches. We have a long-term strategy of exponential growth. We’re sticking to it. No shortcuts.

Each platform favors posts that drive engagement. That’s a given. But on Twitter/X, there is a disproportionate reward for a certain type of engagement. There was a pair of interactions this past March that reinforced, to our team, that we really shouldn’t be devoting a lot of time to this platform.

North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, a Strong Towns supporter in a deeply Red Team state, was speaking at a conference of governors. He said some bold things about zoning, housing policy and transportation that, if it were just read as a transcript with no attribution, those living in a Blue Team bubble would never have guessed where it came from. This is a uniting kind of rhetoric — we can all agree on these things — and I retweeted the video on Twitter/X with thoughts along those lines.

Just 23 minutes earlier, Kea Wilson, the Senior Editor at Streetsblog USA (and former Strong Towns staffer), had retweeted the same video, but her comments had a very different vibe. She called Governor Burgum a “ghoul” and, instead of focusing on areas of agreement, used the post to point out ways we should be divided — irreconcilably so — using a polarizing, condescending framing.

The two of us have very different approaches to social media, and our organizations have very different strategies for bringing about change. I can accept that; there is room for many voices reaching many different audiences, using many different strategies. Even so, Twitter/X consistently has a very clear preference that is reflected in these two posts.

Metric	Chuck from Strong Towns	Kea from Streetsblog
Followers	22,600	3,400
Impressions	31,900	182,200
Likes	366	438
Comments	15	92
Retweets	49	74
Total Engagement	430	604
Engagement per 1,000 Impressions	13	3

Now, I recognize that this is just one example. Lots of people on the platform can point out instances where they feel they have high engagement and are cheated of impressions. I recognize there is variability and 23 minutes of posting time spread is sometimes an eternity in the social media world. Even so, it’s not like this happened in a bubble. 

In fact, it happened exactly when the very thoughtful, intentional and experienced team of media-savvy professionals at Strong Towns were in the middle of trying to figure out what was going on with Twitter/X. It’s one compelling example, but it vividly reinforced a trend we had been experiencing for some time. It has only accelerated since.

Be a jerk and get traffic. Stay clean, focus on the positive, and lose traffic to those who play along with the platform, regardless of how engaging you are. 

Thou Shalt Not Block the Jerks

I’ve long had a policy about moderating my own personal accounts. I liberally use the mute feature on Twitter/X (or hide feature on other platforms) as a way to shield myself from trolls and commenters who, in my opinion, are only there to act stupidly and provide diminished value to my life. I use the block feature, however, to shield the people who are interacting with me in good faith from those who are not.

The block feature is very important to me. It is a way for me to show basic respect to the thousands of people there to hear from and interact with me. I am always open to a back and forth, the probing of ideas and the challenging of assumptions. In fact, I’d much rather interact with a thoughtful critic than a fanboy. It is hard to understate how much I learned in the early days of Strong Towns by trying out ideas and getting thoughtful reactions on social media.

We’re building a positive movement for change, which is not conducive to letting my Twitter/X followers get bullied and harassed just for interacting with me.

Well, so long to the block feature.

I’ve actually not blocked that many people, but those I have blocked are generally accounts that invite swarms of their own followers to descend on my feed, or the Strong Towns feed, overwhelming whatever decent discourse remains.

Those of you still on the platform may have noticed that we have pulled back from posting anything about housing. We post about housing elsewhere and have generally good conversations in those places, but we keep those messages off Twitter/X. This is primarily a reaction to the approach used by the organization California YIMBY.

California YIMBY has devoted a lot of resources to being connected on Twitter/X. They have adapted their housing advocacy strategy to the confrontational approach that flourishes on the platform and have been very successful in that space as a result. As part of that strategy, their staffers would routinely dunk on our stuff, quote-tweeting our posts or dropping into our feed with snide and derisive commentary. Our housing content is mostly pro-YIMBY. We really should be allies, frenemies at worst. I think we would be if it weren't for Twitter/X.

The California YIMBY strategy is to use the Twitter/X platform to pounce on divergences in perspective, adding the occasional dog whistle slur (“supply denier” and “NIMBY-lite” are frequent favorites) as a way to mobilize people to flood our feed (and others).

And flood our feed they would, shouting down those who dared engage in the nuance of a wickedly complex issue. It got so bad that I finally blocked a bunch of them. One prominent California YIMBY staffer’s response to being blocked was to post a series of attacks on me personally, using screen grabs to make numerous disingenuous and false claims, directing a torrent of hate toward my Twitter/X feed.

I don’t need this. My Twitter/X followers don’t need this. And I don’t need a platform that encourages and rewards this kind of jerk behavior.

Losing the block feature — handing people and organizations like California YIMBY the ability to act in bad faith in our area of advocacy without giving me any recourse — is the last straw for me. Twitter/X isn’t a platform fertile for sharing Strong Towns ideas. It’s not a platform suited to the kind of movement we’re trying to build.

So, What Comes Next?

I’m not quitting Twitter/X completely. I’ll still be there occasionally, mostly for Minnesota Twins and Timberwolves content. Strong Towns will likely stick around for a while, although with a vastly reduced commitment to the platform. I canceled my subscription and disconnected what remains of the feeble analytics drip we still get from the site. We’re spending our energy — and our marketing budget — in other places.

It feels a bit cliche at this point, but I have been encouraged to reactivate my Substack account (yes, I know, everyone has a Substack now), which I was using exclusively for my fiction writing. I’m now planning to run my weekly column there (it will still appear first and foremost on the Strong Towns site), along with other archival content and some site-specific stuff. I’m really enjoying Substack Notes, which feels a lot like the early days of posting on Facebook (a positive experience).

For Strong Towns members, we’re working to figure out how to get you access to everything I’m doing on Substack. I know some of you hang out there and are excited about us regularly being in that space with you — I am, too. Nothing is gated now, so go ahead and sign up.

If you’re not on Substack, no problem. The main Strong Towns site is still going to be the primary home for everything I do, as well as lots of great stuff from many other contributors that are part of our conversation.

---

---

RELATED STORIES

---