Thursday, December 15, 2022

And… I’m Out

 Going forward, I won’t even be posting links on Twitter.

The purge of Musk-covering journalists was the last straw. Musk is, of course, well within his rights to make up whatever new terms of service he sees fit and then arbitrarily claim to apply them to whoever he wants. It’s his system, and he gets to.

But the reasons he’s doing it are obvious and execrable. Don’t even remotely consider the arguments of choads who equate this to their worst fantasies of what Twitter was up to pre-Musk, and their much looser definition of “journalist”, in order to justify it. What’s different is who they’re targeting and why, and it’s more than just a difference of “right vs. left” opinion. But you know that.

If you don’t make a living that involves promoting yourself on Twitter, I recommend you disengage too. Stop posting. Stop liking and retweeting. Starve the beast of content. If you can, switch to a third-party client that lets you read stuff without seeing ads. If you do make a living that involves promoting yourself on Twitter, it’s obviously a lot more difficult, but eventually there won’t be much of an audience left to promote to.

Here’s where the content goes. youaredumb.net and oldnerd.net. Theyr’re bog-standard Google Blogger, do what you need to do to see or be alerted. I’ll keep using Mastodon and Post (and try to get that info in the links this weekend) and whatever else tries to capture Twitter’s disaffected audience, but for putting my thoughts out there, this is the place. Because that place is a fascist shitshow.

2 comments:

  1. I use Twitter primarily as an intake medium, and until the NWS accounts move somewhere I'll still be looking, and rarely commenting, but I use adblock plus and rarely use the mobile app so no ads. Mastodon works pretty much the same as Twitter if all you want to do is follow people and maybe find more people to follow when those people post interesting stuff in your feed. Post has a waitlist, so we'll see.

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  2. I’m going to experiment with Instagram (ugh) to see if that’s an adequate intake substitute for the variety of (relatively) famous people I follow on Twitter but I suspect it won’t be the same because they’ve all developed Twitter posting habits. But if they migrate those habits IG is the most likely bet. Probably won’t use IG for posting unless necessary.

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Don’t make me regret turning this on.