i want to talk a little about my time on twitter over the past year, for the sake of sorting out my

i want to talk a little about my time on twitter over the past year, for the sake of sorting out my feelings on the experience and how i want things to be going forward

some of you who know me personally know that the nature of my career was such that i did not keep regular hours- couldn’t keep them, really. this essentially left me unable to interact with the FFXIV community at large in any consistent way. having never really known anything else, i was okay with that. i had my blog here on tumblr, and i had my small circle of close friends who i kept in touch with in game and on discord. that was fine.

when c19 hit, my job changed practically overnight. i won’t get into the details here, except to say that i was very fortunate. the kind of work i was doing changed, and suddenly my schedule became consistent. for the first time in my life, i was working a 9-to-5, Monday-to-Friday routine. it was stability unlike any i’d ever experienced as a millennial in the workforce. this level of stability gave me a sense of freedom, and with that freedom, i decided to try something new. i’d heard about large parts of the FFXIV community heading to twitter after the mass exodus that followed the Great Tumblr De-Sexification. with some trepidation, i followed.

i’d only used twitter sparingly before that. i didn’t have a clear understanding of how the platform really worked, or how best to use it. there was a rather large learning curve, but the sheer size of the FFXIV community there encouraged me to stick with it. for the first time in a long time, i felt like i was really connecting with other players. it felt much more personal than my blog had, and i liked that feeling.

it didn’t take me long to pick up the basics. twitter wasn’t very good for pictures, video, audio, or even just simple writing… but it was great for shouting brief, snappy soundbites into the void, and if you could do that in a way that funny, you could build a following relatively easily. i found my niche and nurtured it well. my gimmick- typing every tweet in all capital letters, “to make sure you can hear me over the Internet”- was well-received.

i guess this is probably just another case of me being late to the party on something everyone else already knew, but i pretty quickly got addicted to that endorphin rush of tweeting something and watching the numbers go up. but as much as i was enjoying my growing notoriety as FFXIV twitter’s resident shitposter, it was getting harder and harder to ignore how volatile the community could sometimes be

i’m not going to lay this at the feet of the FFXIV community, at least not wholly. anyone who’s been part of it for any length of time can tell you that it’s about as susceptible to the same pitfalls as any large fandom tends to be. there’s a specific kind of culture on twitter, though- it’s a very personal, violently angry kind of culture. simple disputes over fiction would escalate into moral crusades that sometimes had real and extremely damaging consequences.

this has been written about elsewhere far more eloquently than i can express, i’m sure, but after awhile, i began to realize that twitter, as a platform, thrives on this kind of negative engagement. due to how it limits other forms of media, and the way its timeline algorithm works, vitriol is the only content that can truly succeed there. it’s true of the whole site, and no less true for FFXIV, where dogpiling was something that happened with frightening regularity.

i was prepared to ignore it. i saw that it was a problem, and i think in my heart of hearts i knew that the rapidly escalating tension was eventually going to become too much for me to bear, but to be frank, i was addicted. i was addicted to the cycle of getting likes and retweets, and i was addicted to the negativity. i was ready to turn a blind eye and act as though i was above it all, so long as i got my fix

it was only once the problem came home for me that i kind of got shaken out of my trance and realized i needed to change things. i’m not going to go into details here, either, other than to say that my significant other became the target of one of FFXIV twitter’s frequent dogpiles, and i couldn’t stand to see her treated that way. it had to end. it had to stop. so i did.

and now i’m back on tumblr again, for the sake of having a space to express myself creatively.

it’s a weird feeling, coming back to this after being away so long. but it’s comfortable, like an old sweater that still fits. i missed it.

anyway, that’s my story. again, no real driving point behind me posting it here, other than me sorting out my feelings and getting them all down on paper, so to speak.