Episode 5: What happens when all the good people leave social media?
January 30, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readIn October 2023, Chloe Valdery deleted a Twitter account with 110,000 followers. Not a soft exit—a hard delete, the kind that cannot be undone. She was one of the few people on the platform who intentionally walked into the worst debates—the 2020 DEI flame wars, the call-out pile-ons—and tried to de-escalate them with empathy and humanization. It worked for a while. She made real friends, built real influence, and had real impact. Then she concluded that the platform itself made her mission impossible. "The thing that I'm preaching isn't actually possible here," she says. "It's not fertile ground for what I'm trying to do."
Why leaving was a structural decision, not just a burnout decision
Valdery’s choice was not primarily about exhaustion, though that was real. It was about structural integrity—the mismatch between her goal (cultivating empathy and belonging) and the platform's design (optimized for outrage and rapid-fire reaction). She noticed that her own nervous system was changing. On Twitter, her default impulse shifted from "How can I listen to what this person is saying?" to "How can I defeat this person's argument?" The medium made her into a debater, not a connector, regardless of her intentions.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **The Hard Delete** - Host Tobias Rose-Stockwell introduces Chloe Valdery, who deleted a 110,000-follower Twitter account, and frames the episode around what happens when thoughtful people abandon social media.
- 2 (03:14) **What Chloe Does Now** - Chloe explains her work with Theory of Enchantment, a framework for healthy discourse and belonging that emphasizes embodiment and somatic awareness.
- 3 (05:21) **The Hard Delete and Its Aftermath** - Chloe describes deleting her account in October, with no urge to return, and explains why Substack feels healthier than X.
- 4 (07:44) **The Impossibility of Empathy on Twitter** - Chloe argues that Twitter's text-only, context-free format makes genuine humanization impossible, even for someone who tried to be a "tuning fork" for compassion.
- 5 (11:47) **What Is Lost When the Good People Leave** - The host presses Chloe on whether deleting her account abandoned the community she helped humanize.
- 6 (14:10) **Fighting as Connection** - Chloe reframes online outrage as a distorted form of connection, and contrasts it with healthier physical outlets like martial arts.
- 7 (16:17) **The Crusader Mentality and Moral Superiority** - Chloe connects online righteousness to historical crusader and Puritan impulses, warning that over-identifying with moral outrage leads to "supremacy complexes" on all sides.
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Show Notes
What happens when the good people leave social media?
Chloé Valdary walked away from 110,000 followers on social media. Not a quiet, lurking exit — but a hard delete.Chloé was a force of nature on Twitter. She built a huge following helping people navigate some of the platform’s thorniest issues with grace and empathy. While many cancelled and called out, Chloé dove headfirst into the hardest conversations offering deep reflection and a dose of savvy humanizing. From George Floyd to Gaza, she was there, helping to deescalate.
Then she left.
In this episode, we unpack what it means when moderates like Chloé leave the platforms that dominate our public conversation.
Who is left? Usually it’s the most polarized and extreme users, who actively own the discourse after that point.
We talk a lot about social media as an Outrage Machine (and my book — of the same title), the hidden incentives shaping our behavior on these platforms, and the mental health cost of constant moral performance.
* If a social platform is a toxic place, what are the obligations we have to the public commons in staying there?
* Are big digital spaces like social media structurally incapable of supporting prosocial conversations?
* Can we protect our mental health while still participating in online political debate?
This conversation explores the trade-offs.
Chloé’s Substack: Musings with Chloé
Chloé’s work: Theory of Enchantment
A small ask:
The irony is not lost on me in trying to critique the algorithms while still being dependent upon them to reach the right audience.
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