This is a post about Twitter (I refuse to use ‘X’) and what it has become….the article referenced in this post is from The Guardian….I ceased all association with Twitter right after Musk took over basically because I think he is huge prick and figured he would piss up Twitter at his first opportunity.
I considered leaving Twitter as soon as Elon Musk acquired it in 2022, just not wanting to be part of a community that could be bought, least of all by a man like him – the obnoxious “long hours at a high intensity” bullying of his staff began immediately. But I’ve had some of the most interesting conversations of my life on there, both randomly, ambling about, and solicited, for stories: “Anyone got catastrophically lonely during Covid?”; “Anyone hooked up with their secondary school boy/girlfriend?” We used to call it the place where you told the truth to strangers (Facebook was where you lied to your friends), and that wide-openness was reciprocal and gorgeous.
It got more unpleasant after the blue-tick fiasco: identity verification became something you could buy, which destroyed the trust quotient. So I joined the rival platform Mastodon, but fast realised that I would never get 70,000 followers on there like I had on Twitter. It wasn’t that I wanted the attention per se, just that my gang wasn’t varied or noisy enough. There’s something eerie and a bit depressing about a social media feed that doesn’t refresh often enough, like walking into a shopping mall where half the shops have closed down and the rest are all selling the same thing.
In 2023, the network now known as X began sharing ad revenues with its “premium” users, and I joined Threads (which is owned by Meta), but all I ever see on it is strangers confessing to boring misdemeanours. I remained on X, where everything got darker. People get paid, indirectly through advertising, for engagement. Even that is a bit murky, since it’s described as “revenue sharing”, but you don’t get to see which ads’ revenues were shared with you, so can’t measure revenue-per-impression. Is X sharing it 50/50? Or 10/90? Are they actually paying you to generate hatred?
I originally used Twitter for a news feed and it progressed into a cluster fuck and has become a monumental cluster fuck since Musk acquisition.
Please share your thoughts on Twitter and its direction.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
What a mess!!
I really do not see a way out.
Too late now to find a way out…..even making new sites will not help just be more hindrance. chuq
I never joined any of them, and I’m glad I didn’t. Facebook is little more than blatant spyware and as for twitter, no one ever explained to me why the hell I should care about the opinions of random strangers in the first place. Life is too short to waste it with my face glued to a phone waiting for people I don’t care about, will never meet and who are, for the most part, idiots, posting pictures of bad food, bizarre memes, etc.
Twitter was the only one I joined but like I said it was the news feeds when it became an outlet for idiots I moved on….never joined FB I refuse. chuq
Well, the ad revenue explains it. This morning, I saw a repost of something interesting and a comment saying no one would answer the question. I took the bait. Within minutes, two others tweeted to me with questions. I replied maybe twice before another person joined in. That is when I stopped and checked out the timeline of the person who first posted a question that “no one will answer”. It was in March when she last posted anything. I figured then that it was a planned, organized way of spurring comments/activity, and your post helps me understand why. My absence didn’t stop them. I received 2 more notifications. They don’t know when to quit but I do.
Wise choice to bow out….those sites are becoming more pathetic by the year. Nice to see you again…thanx for stopping by chuq
I used Twitter to promote blog posts, (mine and those of others) and I also followed some film/cinema sites and some London nostalgia sites. Then it became bombarded with Far-Right and Neo-Nazi users posting the same thing dozens of times every day. The Blue Tick sites asked the same questions every day, or posted the same cute animal videos every day to generate clicks and earn money.
I stuck with it, having to find the people I followed in between a raft of crap that I had no interest in. Then I blocked Elon Musk, so I didn’t have to see his nonsense on my feed. A few days later, Twitter asked me to log in again, (for the first time in 12 years!) quickly telling me that my site was already in use (by me of course) and I would need to create a new identitiy to continue. So they basically threw me off the platform. No tears from me.
Best wishes, Pete.
I got rid of it when Musk took control….I have never liked the prick and figure he would screw it up somehow. And he did. chuq
If Trump gets to be president again, Musk is going to become the czar that takes care of eliminating all the wasteful spending in the government including probably social security, medicare, snap benefits, aid to dependent children, a lot of the social efforts to help the down, the out, the indigent, the sick and the halt and the lame…it has not yet begun.. but the darkness is fast approaching.
Musk will turn on Trump the first chance he gets….whatever will profit him. chuq