036 - RIP @ScottRogowsky (2011-2025)
Officially killing off the app that's already been dead to me for years
Do not consider this a funeral; it’s a celebration of life.
After 14 years (about half of which were “good”) and 10,481 tweets (about half of which were “good”), I am finally deleting my Twitter.1
Not my account — gotta keep that baby parked for eternity — but all my tweets… they’re going, going, gone! Shazam! Slate, consider yourself WIPED CLEAN!
WHY I AM DOING THIS:
Twitter sucks.
It’s sucked for a while now.
Elon sucks.
He’s sucked for a while now.
I’m over it.
I’ve been over it for a while now.
Sadly, this doesn’t mark the total and complete cessation of my Twitter use, for I will no doubt be contractually required to make prescribed promotional posts in the course of future deal terms and marketing initiatives. In fact, allow me this moment to announce that BIG THINGS are in the works from Rogo Inc., and you will be among the FIRST to hear about ‘em in this here ‘STACK — beginning with this logo tease:
More on that another day…
Today is about honoring my fallen tweets: those brave letters, typographical symbols, and punctuation marks who came together, day in and day out, for nearly a decade and half, to project my weirdest comedic impulses and promote every goddamn show I was ever involved in. God bless the mess that was @ScottRogowsky 🫡 🇺🇸
My decision to go full-court press in pursuit of a career in show business directly coincided with the rise of digital media and mobile technology. I entered college before the creation of YouTube; I graduated with the roll out of the first iPhone. MySpace went live the week of my Freshman Orientation. Facebook reached my school at around the same time that Twitter launched during my junior year.
It’s clear to me now that I am of the last generation of comedians to have come up in the era of legacy media, when landing a set on a late-night talk show or an appearance on Premium Blend was practically one’s only chance for a ticket to ride.
“Ya know kids, back when I was your age, ‘having followers’ meant “calling the cops!”
In the summer of 2011, I was four struggle-filled years into my postgraduate endeavor of aspiring to become a comedy performer and/or writer — although that point, I would have settled for writers’ assistant. It seemed the gravy train to TV fame had just left the station for good, leaving me out of breath on the platform and choking in a cartoonish cloud of black smoke. It also seemed a new train had begun picking up such a head of steam that I wondered if I had yet missed my chance to jump on.
Recognizing it would be game over for my brain as soon as I was given always-on access to a mini-computer in my pocket, I was stubbornly late to smartphone ownership and subsequently, social media. By the time I caved to the iPhone 4, Twitter had already proven revolutionary. Its mechanics of retweets, mentions, quote tweets, hashtags, tending topics, and direct messaging were promoting previously unheard of levels of user engagement, and its Follow model — one that, for the first time in social networking, did not require a ‘friend acceptance’ to initiate account interaction — had introduced to Homo Sapiens the ability to quantify one’s popularity and cultural relevance.
I begrudgingly recognized the potential of this enchanted land of constricted character counts where comedians — thanks to their expert facility with the economics of words — reigned supreme. King Michael Ian Black ruled with an iron fave over his subjects, who spent all hours of the day competing to outshine each other with concisely constructed satire, witty one-liners, and absurdist word play.
As follower counts for the funniest users ballooned, a growing breed of Web 2.0 comedy writers like Rob Delaney and Megan Amram seemed to spring up out of nowhere to become “famous on Twitter” (a celebrity akin to “respected in prison,” but with more book deal opportunities).
At the same time, I hated everything I had seen from social media — for how its hellish vortex of navel-gazing vapidity was systematically sucking up our attention, for how quickly it seemed to be dampening the impulse toward ‘spoken conversation,’ for how any Joe Schmo could now call himself a “comedian” by simply calling himself one in his Twitter bio. Comedy was supposed to be SACRED. Gatekeepers were keeping the gates FOR A REASON.
So that’s how I found myself in the vexing predicament of feeling immorally obligated to join the favoriting fray and retweeting rabble; to follow the herd in herding followers so as to validate my virtual existence on a platform where it seemed the best case scenario was having my own jokes getting me canceled and costing me millions, as had recently happened to poor Gilbert Gottfried!
It was hard to think of more pointless undertaking than signing up for Twitter…
But you know I had to do it to ‘em!
Registering with the purposefully misspelled handle @ScottRagowski in one of my signature self-satisfying and intentionally self-sabotaging bits, I bellyflopped into Twitter’s deep end on the afternoon of July 11, 2011:
Immediately I was possessed of an inchoate, ironic “Twitter voice” whose foundational satirical target was the very platform it was using:
My first order of earnest business was reheating some of my all-time most-liked Facebook statuses and discreetly serving them up as “fresh-baked tweets:”
I was punning like nobody’s business:
I continued making meta fun of the site itself; its memes, its motifs, its… “tweeps:"
I employed deliberately useless hashtags:
I got political:
I had poop jokes:
I had dick jokes:
I made a lot of jokes about how I’m bad with girls:
I made a lot of jokes about how I’m bad at Jewish:
I had some genuine corkers that still hold up:
I even had visual gags:
It was a good run, but now I’m done. Peace to my tweeps, I’m picking up stakes and taking my wares elsewheres…
No, not to Bluesky…
Not to Threads…
Not to Mastodon…
Not to Truth Social…
TO RIGHT HERE, BABY!
Substack has a microblogging feature called Notes. It works very much like Twitter, and just as I was with my early tweets — check those stats: zero replies, zero RTs, zero likes! — I am dog shit at ginning up engagement in them.
Nevertheless, he persists… and this twip down memory lane has inspired him to get back into the quip game! Not only will those original late-00s Facebook statuses-turned 2010s Twitter tweets find new life yet again, spit-polished and repurposed as Substack Notes, I pledge to drop fresh batches of brain turds for my Modern Lifers each and every day from here on out. I’m sorry in advance.
As I officially close the book on this storied chapter in my online life, I leave you with these prescient tweets from 28-year-old Rogo, who only wished the end could have come sooner:
OK but also, one more for the road:
I shall forever refuse to call it X.