Obituary for Twitter

I'm sure now that Elon Musk is paying out $200 million in golden parachutes, Twitter will hang around, and eventually the advertisers will come back at a reduced price now that they've stuck it to Elon, but I pronounce Twitter dead. I'm still going to go there, but reading that Elon fired all the human rights people, so you know. It's only a matter of time once the human rights people leave.

I migrated to Mastodon, but I imagine there will be another platform I will migrate to from there. There's a need for a twitter like posting area where you can blurt short thoughts to the world to be ignored, and people can fantasize about being an influencer. 

I keep my facebook because it has a lot of old photo storage. I even go there once a week or so for a lark. Not sure but I just stopped visiting the site. I go to Reddit first, then Google News, then Twitter. Added in Mastodon. It takes a while to build up people to follow. Get the lay of the land.

The highlight of Facebook was the Shakespeare 2020 group, when a bunch of people read through Shakespeare in a year according to some guy's schedule. From there it branched off into a Dickins or Transcendentalist group and I went Transcendental. I didn't really like reading Transcendentalists beyond Dickinson who was vaguely T, but I read a bunch of biographies, and really liked the ones on Margaret Fuller. Fascinating woman. I really liked being a Transcendentalist nerd for a year. 

Pro tip: sign up for Mastodon on your phone because when you download the app after you sign up from a desktop, you can't figure out how to connect the account, pick the servers. It way too complicated. I guess I'm old because I'm finding more and more unsolvable tech problems. I can't set my google searches back to English either, because of all the languages that one is no longer available, somehow. I'm so glad there are other search engines for when you've kacked up the main one. I was searching for an article about Oriel Romeu, the Spanish defensive midfielder who left Southampton for Girona. He was born south of Barcelona, and Girona is north, but he probably feels at home. He looks like a skeleton with his shaved head, but I like his defensive play and I read he likes to read. He even wrote a book that I hold out no hope of ever being translated into English.

Who are my favorite people to follow and what are my favorite twitter experiences, in memorandum? I really like Hannah Cox Richardson, she's an awesome historian who writes the truth with a left slant. I get her stuff in my mailbox though, don't need twitter. If she likes a tweet that gets me excited. 

I followed Emily Nussbaum to Mastodon. She's the New Yorker TV writer. I met her once after she had just finished a masters in poetry. She's friends with my first ex-wife. 

I like sports stuff, mostly NYCFC. People who follow soccer don't have enough to say to make a blog.

My book bootleg sight has gone dark. I can't share my parents Times account any more. They're figuring out the internet and it's not the wild wild west any more. Maybe over at Twitter.

So goodbye twitter. You were something until an narcissistic jackass took over.

The Age of Social Media Is Ending

Update 11/19/22: It seems like it keeps getting worse and getting worse, but it's still around, so I think maybe it's just an over reaction, honestly, sorry. It's hard to imagine such a knockout blow with so many body blows and it's still standing. I liked the meme that was a guy doing a pitch, which was "literally just like Twitter but without Musk." It's his $44 billion plaything to destroy, and I'm not convinced now that he doesn't want to destroy it, but we'll see. I have to honestly say I was wrong. Reports of Twitter's death are greatly exaggerated. 

11/29/22. My experience of Twitter is that they're doing all sorts of jiggering, lost lots of advertisers, Musk does controversial and attention getting statements that are not intelligent and only self interested. Many fishy things have gone on. Now for me, my notice is to turn on notices, not new action on my account.

Most people would see him as an abject failure or a conquering hero, but of course there's a middle. He can strip the company down to be more lean after becoming bloated with many nice features that kept advertisers, like avoiding misinformation about Covid. That the company evolved to such a way was for a reason and he's just a tinkerer, who's paying for all his mistakes. He did say, essentially, fuck off if you don't like the way I'm running things. I've tried Mastodon and it's promising. It is possible for him to ruin it. But I have blocked him so I don't see his tweets or quotes of his tweets, and blocking a bunch of people seems to be my solution. I can tailor my feed enough to remain. So far.

I'm willing to bet the next micro blogging platform will take off, and it might be Mastodon.

12/4/22 Most people threaten to quit, didn’t.