Goodbye twitter.
I’ve been watching the developments on twitter, and the changes being made, and finally made the decision to walk away.
What put me over the edge? A lot of things. To be honest I’ve used it less and less in the last five years, it’s not part of my job any more and I’ve been blogging less. But I’ve taken time over the last few weeks to remove old tweets and archive screenshots of things that were significant. It’s been a wonderful dive into more than a decade of what I was doing.
I’m really glad I made the effort, because today I saw this tweet reposted on Mastodon.
My twitter account isn’t all that important or exciting, but across twitter there was a treasure trove of images from the Arab Spring, Mumbai attacks, etc. Apparently they’re still held on Twitter servers, but they’re no longer published anywhere public.
Excavating my old tweets was a trip down memory lane. Here are some highlights.
My first tweet
Or at least the first tweet still on my timeline. I remember nothing from the movie but I remember being annoyed by the ads, so perhaps they were more effective than I gave them credit for.
History
I commented on the important issues. This was after the attacks on Brussels, the police asked citizens not tweet about any police activities, and the Citizens responded in the most delightful way. The Guardian article is still live.
Conferences
I found a whole slew of tweets from conferences, images of speakers and commentary on their content.
And this – from back when twitter for business was new and seemed a great way to promote your company – I got paid for my tweet in coffee.
Scam Busting
I found a site that used fake profiles to provide testimonials for their company, I wrote about it and challenged them on twitter. They tried to talk their way out of it, adjusted their site, and eventually blocked me on twitter. I’m still blocked from seeing their account, but now the site is dead.
Work Milestones
At former two companies I used twitter to talk about work milestones (I have not at the current company). I went on to manage the ING News account for another two years.
Playing Games
In the early days people got creative and suddenly we were playing global word games, for a while Artwiculate was my favourite, the goal was to come up with a definition to a daily word prompt. A pre-wordle brain teaser.
I learnt things
I joined online discussion events with people from around the world and learnt from them, sometimes I went on to meet them in real life, sometimes I’d find a whole six degrees of separation thing and they’d turn out to be the colleague of someone else I knew. Sometimes I just learnt stuff from a random person’s tweet. I still use versions of these images to think about projects and change in a company.
Over the years I’ve got a lot out of Twitter, from 2009 – 2014 I posted multiple times a day, mostly on work related content. But at some point my posting slowed, I wasn’t blogging as often as work got busier, and then twitter did something very annoying- they changed the notifications options, suddenly I was getting notified when someone posted, or posted for the first time in a week. I didn’t have that many followers but it quickly became overwhelming and seemed impossible to turn it off. I moved the twitter app off the home page of my phone. Without that constant reminder I posted less and less frequently until I wasn’t posting at all.
I was already an infrequent user by the time the ownership changed, and at first I wondered if there would be changes that would lure me back. I’ve been in a “wait and see” mode for more than a year. There haven’t been enough enticing changes. There are changes that I agree with
- the subscription model is a good idea, but it needs to run separately from verifications.
- There seems to be a removal of old images/media, that could be a cost saving measure, or could be a ‘glitch‘. If it’s a cost saving issue perhaps there needs to be an effective archive so that researchers can use the data/content.
- I’m not mad at the idea of paying the content providers, and of making that possible for relatively small creators. However if your business relies on ad revenue and sees that revenue stream drop by 50%, then I’d question whether this is really a smart business move.
On the other hand the “free speech” mantra seems to have empowered more hate-based content on the site. I’m a fan of free speech, but my freedom ends where it causes harm to others. And twitter is no longer on the right side of that line (it may never have been, but for a while it tried).
What happens now?
Smarter people than me don’t know. Even the current CEO admitted that twitter may fail.
For now I’ve got an account on Mastodon, one on Spoutible, and one on Bluesky. It’s fun comparing how each functions, and finding my people. I don’t know which one will end up being “home” or perhaps none of them will. Maybe I’ll find that it’s not a useful tool anymore.
Image by Lisa McCarty from Pixabay