God Help Me, I’m Back Online
How it feels to be back on social media after more than six months off
Well, it was fun while it lasted. After nuking my personal online presence at the beginning of the year, I’m now back on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok (I have enough of a sense of mercy and personal respect to stay off of Facebook). The only, albeit major, difference is that I’m not on these platforms as my actual self. I’m on them as a promotional vehicle for my writing, and that’s been a nice change of pace.
When I initially wrote about my decision to get offline, I left the door open to possibly getting back on in service of this blog. I had a genuine desire to know what was going on in the world, but I also needed other avenues to promote Diary Of A Failed Comedian outside of my email list and the Notes section of Substack. Just because I don’t expect to make a living off of this project doesn’t mean I don’t seek a wider readership.
So a little over a month ago, I sat down and created accounts across the three platforms I mentioned. I wasn’t posting at all to start. I knew I needed time to create promotional material, so I mostly just used the accounts for lurking and taking in information. My greatest fear with getting back online was that it would start to become a habit again and all of that free mental space I cultivated offline would immediately be taken over by Internet nonsense. After a month of this, the results appear to be conclusive, and vary from platform to platform.
I genuinely have no organic interest in looking at TikTok. There’s a quality to it that is so spastic and addled, so incredibly flailing and desperate, that I find it spiritually repellant. Like, my soul hurts if I look at TikTok for more than five minutes. The speed at which it moves and the way creators try to grab your attention feels gross. You know how watching someone try too hard to be likable makes them way more unlikable than if they did nothing at all? That’s how everyone on TikTok appears to me. And I’m not judging. They’re incentivized by the platform to act this way. I just don’t want to watch it, so I never find myself picking up my phone to open the app.
I also have no interest in Instagram, but for different reasons. Instagram doesn’t actively show you content from people you don’t follow the way that TikTok does. You have to navigate over to the Explore page to find this stuff, and I never have any desire to look at the Explore page. TikTok defaults to the FYP page when you open it, so you never know what you’re going to get. It creates that slot machine feeling the app is known for. Instagram just opens to content that comes from people you already follow. And since I don’t follow many people right now, Instagram feels boring. I ignore TikTok because I’m repulsed by it, but I ignore Instagram because I’m indifferent to it.
The real problem has been Twitter. I feel compelled to check it all the time. However, I think my compulsion might be circumstantial. You see, the weekend that I got back online also happened to be the same weekend where the former President nearly had his head blown off on live television. Within 12 hours of signing up for Twitter again (I’m not calling it X, I will never call it X, I don’t trust anyone who calls it X) I was deep in a rabbit role of swiping down and refreshing my feed, constantly being fed a new string of information and memes. It was genuinely the most surreal online experience of my life. Imagine not getting in a pool for the entire summer and then deciding to swim the English Channel on Labor Day. That’s how it felt, and my dopamine receptors have yet to recover. I’m checking Twitter a lot now, and yes I’m entertained by a lot of what I see, but I feel like what I’m really doing is chasing that first insane high I got when I signed back up. Of course, that was a once-in-a-lifetime event, so I will most likely never experience something like that again. At least, I hope I won’t. If I do, I’ll have bigger problems than scrolling too much.
Since I’m not actively checking TikTok and Instagram, and I’ve had to resort to leaving my phone in another room to avoid Twitter, what am I actually using these apps for? Well, after taking a few weeks to create the necessary materials, I finally started posting. But first I had to figure out what it was I wanted to post, and how that would have to be modified for each app.
Twitter was easy. I would just post links to each essay, thread it with a few quotes, and go about my day. The problem is that Twitter actively blocks Substack links, so I had to buy a domain and then integrate it via the Substack platform. This actually worked out for the better since it’s much easier to tell people to go to www.afailedcomedian.com instead of www.afailedcomedian.substack.com. I also signed up for Twitter Premium to unlock all of its extra features. I know admitting this is very gauche and a major self-own in the online world, that blue checkmark being a badge of dishonor, but it helps improve your reach on the platform. So I’m just calling it a marketing expense and not thinking too hard about the purchase.
However, another interesting feature of Twitter Premium is the fact that you can write “Articles.” I guess this is their attempt to compete with Substack in the long-form writing space. So now, instead of posting links to the blog, I just copy and paste what I’ve written into their Articles feature. I figure they’ve most likely tailored the algorithm to boost new features they’ve built, so posting in Articles will create a better chance of finding an audience than just posting links. We’ll see how it pans out.
Instagram and TikTok have been a fun exercise in flexing an old muscle that I developed while making content in my stand-up days. I got pretty good at Canva in 2023 when I was editing images and thumbnails for my stand-up videos and sketches, and I’ve been able to put that to good use while making Instagram and TikTok posts. I simply take the image that I’ve used in each essay, put the title over it, and then make a few additional images with my favorite lines from the piece. It ends up looking like the below on Instagram, where square images are best.
I was flabbergasted to learn that TikTok allows you to post still images, I thought they were video only. However, the tech space is nothing but companies copying each other to try and make a buck, with no compunction about intellectual property or propriety, so on TikTok I just resize the images to fit their vertical aspect ratio, slap some relevant music over them, and call it a day. They come out looking like this.
So, that’s it. I’m back online and posting again. I haven’t gotten much traction with my posts yet, but that’s because I haven’t been actively promoting my accounts. I’ve mostly just been posting and leaving it up to the algorithm. So hey, maybe, you know, while you’re here and all, you might want to go ahead and follow me on one, or possibly all three of the platforms below?
You knew this ask was coming. The Internet eventually consumes us all. There is no escape. Resistance is futile. See you online.
December 2024 Update: I kept up with Instagram and TikTok for a few months after I posted this, but I never got anything out of it, so I deleted my accounts for my own sanity. I’m still active on Twitter and Reddit though, so you can follow me there if you want.
I deeply respect that you still call it Twitter