People do not have good opinions. People form good opinions.

That’s why for the second and final time, I have quit Twitter. I can no longer debase myself and devalue the power of a good article by slangin’ the muck with the lowest form of media. Not every thought a person has during their day is worth sharing, and for the vast majority of the social media muck that’s what Twitter readers are getting: Someone else’s off-hand throwaway thoughts.

Maybe it only takes you one or two seconds to read someone else’s brain trash, but I know that I personally have spent thousands of hours doing just that. And contributing to it. I have not tweeted since the Bills-Bengals game on Monday Night Football, and though I will continue to share Seaside Joe articles on social media, I will never share my thoughts on that website again.

I remain conflicted as to whether or not to have any interactions with Twitter, including sharing tweets, but it is a step-by-step process for me to find out what will work best. In any case, I believe that Twitter is going the way of Facebook at best, MySpace at worst. It’s getting old, it’s been tedious for years, and I have a feeling that site exhaustion will force society to move somewhere else by 2025.

That’s one of the reasons why I pushed all my chips into the newsletter game 1,419 days ago. I was letting a website take all of my thoughts, all of my research, and all of my energy to create content about the NFL and the Seahawks and what does Twitter give users in return? Fake social scores (a large percentage of which is LITERALLY fake interactions by bots) that carry little-to-no value in the real world now, and certainly no value when the site becomes defunct. People will argue that there’s proof that success on Twitter translates to job offers, and that’s technically true, but have you noticed that when PFF or The Athletic hires someone based on social scores that the eventual product on their websites is…substandard and infrequent?

I’ve hired or worked with writers based on a social score and from personal experience, it doesn’t yield the results you expect. Let’s just say that. Because maybe writers can tweet, but not all tweeters can write. And I’m not even sure writers can or should tweet…I certainly won’t.

I say all that not only to get you to share and subscribe to Seaside Joe—as much as I love to self-promote—but to get to the fact that Twitter and other social media works so well because goddamn it is APPEALING to get immediate dopamine rewards for doing jack shit. I mean, I was never even good at Twitter so I wasn’t able to build a massive following like so many of the people who I came up with at the same time (I was there when Mina Kimes had less than 500 followers) so I only ever got the smallest taste of success. And it’s so addictive.

I can’t imagine how powerful that force is when you’ve achieved 50,000 or 100,000 or 1,000,000+ followers. When every single throwaway nothing of a thought returns you 500 or 1,000 or 5,000+ likes and endless notifications; I imagine that’s one of the reasons that Elon Musk added view count to tweets recently, because the biggest accounts were most likely desensitized to the rewards of retweets, likes, and replies.

It couldn’t possibly work any different than a drug addict. It doesn’t work any different than a drug addict. People frame it as “haha i’m addicted to social media” but it’s much more literal than “haha” would indicate.

I also say this for the umpteenth time because as far as I can tell, nobody else in my industry does. Maybe because so many in my industry are users. Users. And it is simply not possible for sports media to be unaffected by social media; it’s been impacted and it’s been impacted negatively.

But damn…it feels good to just say shit you think sometimes!

So today, I want to say a few things about football that I’ve been thinking, but I’ve tried to sit on my thoughts for a while rather than to just throw them into the internet’s woodchipper and pray that you like sloppy Joes. And sometimes that could be a response to said throwaway thoughts that have dominated the NFL conversation a times. Like this one:

Owain Jones @Owain_Jones_

Trevor Lawrence is unbeaten at 37-0, playing on a Saturday over his entire career. Make of that what you will... #NFL #DUUUVAL

4:24 PM ∙ Jan 21, 2023

The Trevor Lawrence “Saturday stat” is the dumbest football thing that I’ve seen promoted as a “cool football thing” in a long time. And people keep saying it!

Lawrence was 1-0 on Saturday in the NFL prior to throwing four interceptions in the first half last Saturday against the Chargers. If he wasn’t bailed out by Brandon Staley and company in the second half, Lawrence would have lost a Saturday game seven days ago. As for high school and college: We can assume most NFL quarterbacks might have been dominant in high school (a Friday sport for the most part) and then Lawrence played at Clemson, a powerhouse program for several years before he arrived.

In fact Kelly Bryant, the QB in between Deshaun Watson and Lawrence, went 12-0 on Saturday in 2017.

That’s something I wanted to tweet on Saturday, as there have been a lot of things that I’ve wanted to tweet since quitting Twitter for the second time in three years. It takes a little self-control to not tweet every thought. A little patience to see if it’s worth anyone’s time. I hope Seaside Joe is usually worth your time, it’s the only place you’ll find me.

Note: I wanted today’s post to be about something more closely related to the Seahawks but I ran out of time after getting deep into the weeds of quitting social media and why I haven’t been responding to any of your replies or tweets. My apologies! Will hope to have more Seahawks content up soon.

Some of you have also asked if I would address some of the “life” topics that I bring up time to time. For what it’s worth, this month is the four-year anniversary of quitting drinking and that was the beginning of this journey of non-negotiable daily habits. I’ll try to touch base on more of those in the near future.

But mostly…Go Hawks!