Time to Step Away from Twitter

I joined Twitter back in February 2013, when I was in the final stages of completing my PhD at Wisconsin and looking for an academic job. Since then, I can’t emphasize enough how valuable Twitter has been to me professionally. I have made connections with wonderful people, started research collaborations, and disseminated my work to policymakers and journalists. And over the last decade, my trusty account (@rkelchen) has accumulated tens of thousands of tweets and more than 15,000 followers. Not too shabby for a fairly boring professor.

But now it’s time for me to step away from Twitter for at least a while. The platform is becoming more unstable, with more frequent outages, more spam and trolls, and people I deeply respect leaving Twitter. Twitter’s implementation of new usage limits take away the remaining value. A limit of reading 1,000 tweets per day sounds like a lot, but it’s a drop in the bucket of what journalists, industry insiders, and interested parties see on a regular basis. Yes, I could pay for Twitter Blue and be able to not hit the usage limits, but that is not relevant if the people I engage with also don’t pay for Blue. This seems like a desperate gambit from the new Twitter management to get more paid subscriptions, but most users are too skeptical of the future of Twitter to sign up. I’m in that boat, as well.

So I’m stepping away from Twitter at this point due to the benefits just no longer being there. If the rate limit is lifted, I will probably end up coming back in the short term. But it just doesn’t seem like there is much of a future on Twitter, so I’m downloading my archive of tweets and preparing to move on.

Here are the other ways to connect with me:

Blog: I am going to rely more heavily on my blog in the future, as this is a medium that is much more stable. You can sign up to receive updates by clicking on “follow” on the bottom right portion of the page, or you can send me your e-mail address and I will sign you up.

LinkedIn: I will also be posting on LinkedIn more heavily, so you can follow me there. I have maintained a presence there for quite a few years, and it seems like quite a few higher ed professionals have made the move over there. The discussions are pretty good, and there seem to be fewer trolls.

Bluesky: What the heck…I’ll give it a shot. Thanks to Dan Collier for the invite, and my username is a bit different there.

TBD: Are there other social networks I should be trying? Mastodon seems really confusing, TikTok isn’t exactly encouraged in Tennessee, and Facebook/Instagram are too personal.

I won’t be deleting the Twitter app from my phone, so you can still tag or message me and I will respond at some point. But it won’t be my primary mode of communication any longer.

So long, Twitter. It’s been a great ride, and I look forward to staying in touch with you all through other means.