And has it helped?
I've written here before about how I discovered I was "shadowbanned", how Twitter had no way to solve this for me (and still doesn't) and how suddenly my views fell off the world. See this post with photos.
That was in September and nothing's really changed as far as I can tell. Like most people I know I'm not a fan of giving a billionaire money. It was only in desperation that I decided to try Twitter Blue toward the end of March, more than six months after I began to lose impressions and basically my entire Twitter following died a frightening death.
To be honest, I tried my best to avoid having the blue check mark. I suggested as sweetly as I could to the folks who work at Twitter that maybe they could make it possible to turn your blue check off. Some buzz went around that this was happening. So I signed up, only to find out that it hadn't happened, and the only way to make thee heck go away was to change my username or @ name. I toyed around with removing the sunflowers and later putting them back. It did get rid of the check, but it also seemed to take away any benefit of having Twitter Blue, which I admit did seem to help me get more views, though not as many as I once had.
Also something I did recently seems to have decreased my views again. I did disagree with someone on Twitter in a Substack post about her stance on what books should be taught in schools in Britain. You can read that on this site as well.
All of this has served to make Twitter pretty depressing to me, but as I still can't go out, it's one of my few sources of social interaction and if I were to just leave it, I honestly might go completely off my rocker.
So here' s my current thinking. We, the users ARE Twitter, We made it a platform people wanted to use and hang out on. We made good content. We socialized. We brought the laughs, we invited our friends, We created communities. Honestly, we also began to change the world using it, and that's why (in my opinion) Musk bought it. Because he and some others didn't like what we'd been able to accomplish.
I've joined a lot of other social media platforms, and I'm still on Facebook. Right now I'm trying Substack's Notes, which I don't see as a competitor to Twitter because its purpose seems to primarily to help people on Substack get subscribers. And fair enough. I'm on WT.social, Post.news, Instagram (though i almost never post there, just look), Mastodon, probably some other thing I've forgotten. The main thing I've noticed about them is that they aren't a place where a relatively unknown person can come and build a following. Honestly, neither is Twitter anymore. But also, there's this niggling thought in the back of my mind about the US elections in a year and a bit and how the last two election cycles were profoundly affected by social media, Twitter in particular.
Is giving €9.60 a month to the new overlord of Twitter helping me? I really don't know yet. Is it helping the world? Not sure, but than I think Musk's goal has always been to destroy Twitter. The people are dangerous. As James Madison said: The purpose of government is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.
Otherwise we might just eat the rich.
Please tell me in the comments what you think of my Twitter Blue subscription.
I've written here before about how I discovered I was "shadowbanned", how Twitter had no way to solve this for me (and still doesn't) and how suddenly my views fell off the world. See this post with photos.
That was in September and nothing's really changed as far as I can tell. Like most people I know I'm not a fan of giving a billionaire money. It was only in desperation that I decided to try Twitter Blue toward the end of March, more than six months after I began to lose impressions and basically my entire Twitter following died a frightening death.
To be honest, I tried my best to avoid having the blue check mark. I suggested as sweetly as I could to the folks who work at Twitter that maybe they could make it possible to turn your blue check off. Some buzz went around that this was happening. So I signed up, only to find out that it hadn't happened, and the only way to make thee heck go away was to change my username or @ name. I toyed around with removing the sunflowers and later putting them back. It did get rid of the check, but it also seemed to take away any benefit of having Twitter Blue, which I admit did seem to help me get more views, though not as many as I once had.
Also something I did recently seems to have decreased my views again. I did disagree with someone on Twitter in a Substack post about her stance on what books should be taught in schools in Britain. You can read that on this site as well.
All of this has served to make Twitter pretty depressing to me, but as I still can't go out, it's one of my few sources of social interaction and if I were to just leave it, I honestly might go completely off my rocker.
So here' s my current thinking. We, the users ARE Twitter, We made it a platform people wanted to use and hang out on. We made good content. We socialized. We brought the laughs, we invited our friends, We created communities. Honestly, we also began to change the world using it, and that's why (in my opinion) Musk bought it. Because he and some others didn't like what we'd been able to accomplish.
I've joined a lot of other social media platforms, and I'm still on Facebook. Right now I'm trying Substack's Notes, which I don't see as a competitor to Twitter because its purpose seems to primarily to help people on Substack get subscribers. And fair enough. I'm on WT.social, Post.news, Instagram (though i almost never post there, just look), Mastodon, probably some other thing I've forgotten. The main thing I've noticed about them is that they aren't a place where a relatively unknown person can come and build a following. Honestly, neither is Twitter anymore. But also, there's this niggling thought in the back of my mind about the US elections in a year and a bit and how the last two election cycles were profoundly affected by social media, Twitter in particular.
Is giving €9.60 a month to the new overlord of Twitter helping me? I really don't know yet. Is it helping the world? Not sure, but than I think Musk's goal has always been to destroy Twitter. The people are dangerous. As James Madison said: The purpose of government is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.
Otherwise we might just eat the rich.
Please tell me in the comments what you think of my Twitter Blue subscription.
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