Specifically, I miss the evaluation community on Twitter. Since I deleted “X” from my phone in the summer of 2023 (I was at a local soccer game, checked my phone, and saw that the blue bird logo had finally been replaced by the black and white “X”), I lost a space that I spent time in nearly every day, often posting myself but even more often reading.
The freedom I cherished most in that space was not speech, but association. My connections, my community. A near decade of a curated list of a few hundred people I followed who filled my daily feed with information, wisdom, and humour. In fact, I’d just split up my account into one for my professional connections and local news and one for my growing interest in soccer in order to keep things more balanced.
I’m less informed these days and more alone, despite my best efforts. I’ve always followed a variety of news sources, but Twitter was the neighbourhood hangout with the local-est of insights, usually faster and sometimes more accurate and complete then what turned up on the news the next day. I’ve looked for the same people on Bluesky and Mastadon, but I can tell that I’m still less plugged in, even if I don’t quite know what I’m missing.
The same for my professional community. My LinkedIn account is bursting with connections, but too many. I always added and accepted people freely on LinkedIn as a general rolodex of someone I met one time at a conference or a miscellaneous contact from people building up their own network. It was useful that way. But to actually spend time on my feed feels like wading neck-deep through a thousand conferences happening at once. Mostly the least interesting part of conferences too, which is just booths of people hoping to sell you something (I am not exempt from this! Though especially these days it feels like the only thing people want to sell me is AI). I have attempted to trim and curate my feed, but the purpose of LinkedIn is too innately promotional. It will never replicate the casual, conversational atmosphere that was Twitter. Blogging like this also feels mostly solipsistic. Especially in a world where blogs posts are now more a marketing tool than a contribution to a conversation.
Old man yells at cloud, to speak in the language of the Tamarians.
This should be the moment of the turn, the coda in this blog post where I find a deeper meaning or a new way forward. But I just keep thinking about a question someone asked me a few months ago, “Where are all the cool evaluators hanging out?” It used to be Twitter. It is hopefully still places like CREA, though I can no longer join them there. It’s definitely in pockets of places! (Including LinkedIn, and Bluesky, and wherever else people have gone.) But wherever they are, they are harder to find and no longer places we can easily linger.