With Elon Musk taking over as Twitter CEO, I’ve lost a lot of my enthusiasm for a site that had been my primary online hangout since 2008. Although I’m not a fan of Musk’s politics or his business practices (a serious understatement), what I disliked about the takeover is that his opening move was to disrupt — laying off key staff, changing the account verification system in ways that undermined thousands of legitimate information outlets, and sabotaging the moderation system in the name of free speech.
There are two basic theories about why he’s doing this: either he thinks he’s smart enough to fix a highly complex system, built over many years, just by poking it with a stick; or he knows exactly what he’s doing, and is willing to take a serious hit (both financially and legally) to destroy its societal value.
Regardless of his reasons, it took him less than a month to destroy most of what I enjoyed about Twitter. Established voices, marginalized voices, thoughtful voices, are giving up on the platform and scattering to the four winds. Hell, even Dril is leaving.
My Twitter account is something of a record of the last fifteen years of my life, starting pre-Obama when I was working at Amazon. Great for an autobiography. Out of 19,000 tweets, I’m certain there are some good ideas to be mined. (Plenty of bad ones, of course.) I may never be so absorbed in social media or microblogging again. It would be nice to switch gears to long-form writing, either on my blog(s), my procrastinative novel, or for games.
I’ve been “spazquest” online since around 2000, and I once joked that I’d need to rebrand myself around this time in my life. So for my newer social media accounts, I’ve dusted off “Spazahedron,” the name I was using for my webcomic. It’s more obscure — I imagine a spazahedron as a platonic solid with a high degree of randomness — which is total B.S., but would work great in a badly-written sci-fi movie.
Mastodon as a service is interesting, but I think they’re going to smack into similar problems for different reasons. (It would be kind of cool if ex-Twitter people could offer their expertise here.) There are other “Twitter alternatives” as well. At this point, my primary goal is just to make sure people can find me if the services I’m on go away.
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