Thread by @Tracinski

So this helped me crystallizes a lot of what I've been thinking about lately: was social media a mistake?

"The Censorship of Conservatives on the Internet Is Approaching Critical Levels of Bad" redstate.com/brandon_morse/…

I loved the Internet era before social media, before Facebook and Twitter swallowed up everything. Remember blogs? Blogs were great.

But for various reasons Facebook and Twitter killed the blogs. The best and most interesting blog became online publications.

But a lot of the one-person, amateur bloggers moved onto social media. And that turned out to be a big mistake.

The era of blogging made good on the promise of decentralizing media. Anybody could publish and comment on the news and find an audience.

Guys writing in their pajamas at three in the morning could take down Dan Rather. We were bypassing the old media gatekeepers.

And we had control over it! We posted on our own sites. We had good discussions in our own comments fields, which we moderated.

I had an extensive e-mail list of readers who are interested in my work. Still do, but it hasn't grown as much recently, partly because people just follow me on Twitter.

But what kind of raw deal is that? I have 11,000 Twitter followers, but I don't know who they are or have any independent way of contacting them.

In effect, I built up a mailing list for Twitter but not for myself. Facebook is worse, because in addition to getting the mailing list, they also make sure to suck up all the money.

But the worst part is that we have recentralized the media. Instead of a million blogs, @instapundit 's Army of Davids, we now have @jack and Zuck in control of everything.

So we get shadowbanning, and totally arbitrary Twitter suspensions, and Twitter throttling the traffic of people they don't like and controlling what articles you can and can't tweet links to.

And then there's Facebook giving bogus left-wing "fact checkers" a platform to smear anyone on the right under the guise of fighting "fake news."

We traded Dan Rather for new, worse, less publicly accountable gatekeepers in Silicon Valley. A bunch of pinch-nosed puritans with pink hair, piercings, and tattoos.

The point is not that this is censorship and they should be regulated. These platforms have power and influence because we gave them power and influence. Let's just stop.

This also comes from some wider disenchantment with the medium, which sucks up a lot of time that could be better used elsewhere.

So here's what I'm going to do.

1. I'm going off Twitter for a month, starting Sunday. And not a fake Farhad Manjoo break but a real one.

2. Instead of staring at my phone all the goddamned time, I'm going to carry around an honest to goodness book to read.

A lot of my time on Twitter is extra little bits of time when I'm waiting for the kids to get ready for bed, or between sets at the gym. I can fill that with better things.

3. I'm going to go back to what I used to do: checking out a roster of websites and blogs with good information and getting it there directly. You should do the same. Which leads to this...

4. I'm going to spend more time posting extra stuff on my own site, not on Twitter. If you want to read it, go there and get on my mailing list.

tracinskiletter.com

I have a newsletter for paid subscribers, but I also have items I send out for free, and I promise I won't sell your address or spam you with junk ads.

And please, If you have a blog or site or write for a publication, post it in the replies. I'll check it out and link to you if I see something I like.

This is all I can think of: trying to go back to the future, back to the golden age of blogs.

There may be another, better technological solution, but I have come to the conclusion that whatever the answer is, social media was a mistake.

BTW, expect to see all of this written up in a slightly longer article with some more details and posted at The Federalist on Monday.