Twitter: “It’s dead, Jim”
Had enough? After 18 years, I have.
I’ve spent sometime jumping the sinking ship that was, from 2006 to 2015 a fascinating thing to watch. Around 2008, it became seriously mainstream with wine, music, porn (the three pillars of the internet, not in order) and news. Up until 2016, it grew and grew. It became a valuable public utility, while still not figuring out how to monetize. Then came the American presidental election, carefully engineered waves of political bulls… propaganda. I don’t have to draw a picture of what happened when it was sold. There’s no rock remote enough you could be under and not know what it is today.
I’ve had various accounts, at least 10 over the years, but today I have one, and I’m cleaning it out as I write this. I have a music account with 8k followers that I closed a few months ago, when I noticed that at least 90% of the “followers” were either dead, bots or inactive. My original 2006 account had about 1,000 followers as of today and was following about 1,200. Most of those were wine-related as we used to manage online communication for several châteaux here in Bordeaux and elsewhere. It’s funny watching those names fly by as I unfollow them. Many have the word ‘wine’ in the company name or handle, yet I have no idea what they did. Many are in the telecommunications technologies, folks I have met over the years.
To move on, what I did was to set my account to “protected”. That means you have to be following me to read my tweets. Of the thousand, there can ‘t be many who care, as posts are seen by 15–40 people (views). I’m unfollowing everyone, too. I have 2FA set up, so for all practical purposes, it’ll just be dead in the water. (Too many shipwreck metaphors and not enough plane crash.) Because of the changes to the API, the tools that allowed messing with this stuff no longer exist. It’s too expensive to use.
If I know you you most likely have my email. I don’gt hang around Linkedin but I can be reached here if there’s a need to get that address. I’m most active on Bluesky and Threads.
I’ve been on Mastodon for 7 years as well. See you around.
