Blue On Blue

Disenchantment with Twitter has reached an apex

A while back I wrote an article discussing my experiences - good, meh, and ‘seriously?’ - with Twitter Blue. I was considering letting it go, but wanted to give Musk & Co. the opportunity to get the ship sailing in the right direction.

Sadly, that is not happening; if anything, it is more off-course than ever.

For example, I am noticing that tweets are often being suppressed (especially if they have a link to a Substack-hosted page), with the tweets that are seen are not being seen by ‘my people.’ In addition, folks are getting purged now as much as before Elon took over, and those who are surviving the various purges are not being seen by me either.

Simply put, I am not seeing ‘my people,’ and they are not seeing me. The ‘fun’ is being drained out of the site, and if I am not having fun… and they are suppressing my ability to build an active base both there AND here… what’s the point?

Then there is the monetization thing. Look, I am obviously not doing this for the scratch - I love what I do, love the interactions with subscribers, and work very hard at doing it the best I can. I do WHAT I do for the sake of doing, but I offer it online in the hope that others may find value in it.

As such, I would at least like the opportunity to bring home some coin where possible, and Twitter dragging its feet with approving people for said-opportunity smacks of rank elitism. It’s like they are saying, “Okay, we’ll let YOU make money, because you are special… but you and you and YOU? Nope.”

And let us be honest: It is not that hard to do. Substack had me set up for monetization in 10 minutes - very creator-friendly - while it was taking Twitter literally months. There is no excuse for that kind of delay, except the aforementioned elitism.

Still, if Twitter was not suppressing links to any page hosted on Substack, I would not care one wit about the monetization thing; fine, you won’t let me build there, I will do so here. But since they are actively hampering my efforts to build a subscriber base HERE while also denying me the chance to build one THERE? Feels like a pretty raw deal to me.

Raw, indeed… shady, even. Very shady.

As such, after having it for over a year I have allowed my Twitter Blue subscription to lapse, and will not pay again until major changes are implemented. I will keep my account open to utilize for the Evening Lines micro-newscast, and will occasionally post a tweet or two as well, but a majority of my efforts have been - and will continue to be - spent here.

Substack is giving me a genuine opportunity to build something viable here, and I am not going to spend any more time than necessary on a site which is - again, actively - working against my own best interests.

That is just common sense, something I should have figured out months ago.

Credit: Special thanks to Raesa, whose proofing skills are very much appreciated.