I gave it a chance to work. I know of people who would have paid a lot more money than $8 a month for better features. But let’s face it, Twitter is dead.
I went through three lives on Twitter. The first time, I got to 35,000 followers. But I had to quit. Everything was too toxic. I had people say the most bizarre things, it was addictive, and it was taking a toll on me. Ditto for my second Twitter life. It was my own damn fault. My third Twitter life was better. I managed to stay out of fights, be a little less toxic, and I was running ahead of where I was the second time. It was growing, unlike the first two times, where I ran into a brick wall. I was up to 3,800 followers and growing.
But don’t ask me how, but I can tell when a company is in trouble, and when Elon Musk took over, all my alarm detectors were going off like a ten alarm fire. Cases in point:
--Elon started charging for better service. In other words, if you want better service, you pay up $8 a month, or enjoy screaming into the void unless you’re one of the hip, edgy cool kids with cringe takes.
--Elon floated the idea that once you viewed 500 or so tweets a day (or 5,000 if you paid him $8 a month), you were done for the day. That didn’t go over well.
--I was being throttled. It used to be that 30,000 hits a day was a good day for me. But now, I would be lucky if I got to 3,000 a day with 100 tweets or so.
--And then there were the bots. All the “cute girls” dying to go to bed with you (who actually wanted to separate you from your money), empty accounts who just posted 8 or 10 meaningless quotes yet somehow had 7,500 followers, and blank accounts that you couldn’t tell what their game was. It was ironic that the reason Elon played games with Twitter’s former management was that they had too many bots. But when he took over, the “cute girl” bots and others were growing and growing. His “solution?” Charge everyone $1 a year to use Twitter. In other words, he has no solutions. Maybe Elon should have thought of that before he decided to fire all the Twitter employees who were keeping the site going.
--On a related note, I had someone who I know in real life get targeted by a botnet. Which is the real reason Elon Musk loves bots. They inflate his follower count, and they can gang up on people he doesn’t like.
--Elon Musk floated getting rid of the block button, which is essential for protecting one’s self against gangs of Nazis or NRA apologists from attacking you with ever growing toxicity.
But the final straw was when Elon Musk actively promoted Alex Jones. This piece by Joan Walsh brought clarity to my decision. Not only did he bring back Alex Jones, he platformed and promoted him on the 11th anniversary of Sandy Hook, an event which Alex Jones says was a hoax. I get that Elon Musk is the owner of Twitter now. I get that he can allow whoever he wants on that site. He is entitled to whatever outlandish opinions and takes he wants. He can call his platform X or The Flying Spaghetti Cafe or whatever. I hated to give up on a growing account. But when he actively promotes and platforms ghouls like Alex Jones or fascists like Ron DeSantis, that tells me that he is not merely running a business like Facebook or Google or most other companies are. He is turning it into his personal platform to spread his version of hate.
For all its flaws, Twitter filled a valuable need in society. It was a town square where people of all political faiths could get together and interact. But that square is slipping away and going. If you’re still on Twitter, my best advice for you is to get out. You can find me on Mastodon. I have 260 followers there, and I have more traffic, engagements, and thoughtful replies than I did on a Twitter account that was 15 times as big. Mastodon is a decentralized site, with numerous multiple “instances.” The biggest one, which I am on, has 267,000 people or so compared to millions on Twitter.
The way Mastodon works is, Donald Trump could create an account there like any other member of the public. Problem is, Mastodon Social has terms of service which bans the kind of hate speech he spouts. He can form his own Mastodon server, since it is decentralized. Fine. But then most other “instances” can just block Donald Trump’s server, and he would be shouting into the void. He can have his free speech, but then the rest of us wouldn’t have to associate with it.
There are other good social networks out there. I was impressed with Blue Sky; they are very friendly to news organizations and a lot of them have a presence there. But it is invite only. And it’s owned by Jack, founder of Twitter. Which makes me wonder if Jack’s game is to build up these networks to the Next Big Thing and then sell them off for a profit. Tribel is being heavily promoted by Occupy Democrats. A lot of people migrated to Threads when it first popped up, but it is owned by Facebook, which is not as bad as Twitter, but is totally unresponsive to complaints about spammers and bots and even harassers. Tumblr is a nice site with a lot of artists having homes there. But it throttles traffic even worse than Twitter did in the terminal stages of my third life there.
So, good bye and good riddance. But what Elon Musk didn’t realize is that by driving all of us basement dwellers, hippies, bleeding heart liberals, radicals, and other subversives off Twitter is that he only succeeded in planting a seed that will take over the country and the world by storm. I’m not much of an anarchist, but I know enough about it to know that when institutions no longer serve the purpose for which they were intended, We the People should throw them off and create or build up different ones.
Delete my freaking account, Elon.