since i stopped using twitter, cold turkey
and it's fine. i post here, some decent amount, and occasionally i toot on mastodon
but i still have this... weird tiny nagging feeling sometimes... that i used to have something, and i've lost it, and i don't know how to get it back, but i also don't really know what it was.
i don't know if i have much to say here that i haven't said before haha
i think about having a Twitter Following, and the dawning realization that most of them were there for dunks. but even before that, i feel like a lot of them were tech people who found me through my tech blog because i wrote about something mundane but broad-appeal like "there are chess pieces in unicode ā".
i used to have a lot of fondness for twitter. surely at one point i had a decent number of... peers? acquaintances? friends maybe? i can think of at least a few people from twitter who i miss. but our actual interactions were replying to each other every few weeks maybe. do they think of me now? i don't know.
did i have a real audience, or a lot of people who liked a thing i did once and were waiting endlessly for a repeat that will never come? what is an "audience"? people who click the like button? prospective customers? what am i even selling? how am i supposed to make this online entrepreneurial thing work, anyway? patreon peaked years ago and it turns out it was mostly the tech people paying me to write tech posts, and i ran out of things to write for them.
i used to feel like my work was valuable and now i have no idea. but i don't know what "valuable" means, either. but that also didn't start eight months ago. i think it started when lexy's labyrinth received... much less interest than i'd thought it might. a reminder that the things i like aren't, in fact, also things that my twitter followers necessarily like. following my whims didn't feel like a safe bet any more.
every so often i glance at tumblr again and i still just do not know what to post. i made so many tweets, though. what were they about? i tweeted tens of thousands of things. personal anecdotes and jokes and stuff. do i post jokes any more? i don't know. did the response to my twitter jokes get worse over time? i wonder.
i still don't know how to be vulnerable again. i don't know how to even take steps in that direction. i look at my tumblr dashboard and i catch glimpses of people who silently cut me off and i just want them to not remember whatever made them do that because there's always the chance they'll start up an all new public fuss. i remember how many callouts started on tumblr, how there are still hate blogs there obsessing over whatever minutiae of our lives they can manage to overhear, how there is effectively no moderation unless it's about a boob. so my impulse is to keep my head down.
but i'm tired of keeping my head down. i somehow resisted the urge on twitter, but mostly by being mad a lot, and i'm tired of that too.
i feel like i keep going around in circles and writing the same post every couple months. i don't know what the path out of this looks like.
i don't feel as dire as this sounds, i think. i'm physically tired today and that's probably coming across. mostly i perceive a void that i don't know what to do with, and whenever i'm reminded of it it's just... annoying
You should scroll back up and read a little higher about the emotional vulnerability, because I'm about to launch off on something on section 2, and I don't want my post to dilute that.
I talk to my students about 'audience' a lot. Audience is a term that we use because culture has kind of surrounded everyone with the language of media making more than the language of media experiencers. Students, by default, think that 'audience' is 'followers' and I have to spend a semester correcting them, then correcting them the next semester and then the next semester and then they graduate and I plead with them to please stop thinking that way on the way out the door.
Maybe I'm bad at teaching.
Anyway, thing is, the thing I tell them is your audience isn't the people who press a follow button. They're not subscribers. They're not analytics, analytics aren't an audience. Your audience are the people who care about and want to engage with what you're doing; the people who see what you do and want more of it. The people who have a reason to relate to your work; they're learning something, they're engaging with something, they're commenting or they're asking, and the thing is, you're one of those people.
What metrics and follower counts do is create the illusion that you have 'an audience' and that you're now a microbrand who needs to manage your entire network of connections appropriately. You're presenting on multiple platforms for a number, except that number is largely not paying attention to or engaging with you. It's bad at doing what it wants to do.
What I keep impressing on students about audience is find the people who engage with what you make because they care about it. They might be in your followers! But they're not even remotely the same thing.
I'm part of Eevee's audience, but it's in the vein of 'hey, she makes cool digital toys, I like those, and I want to see them when they're available.' I don't understand the CSS crimes stuff. But the thing is, I know that when I see things Eevee's made, I'm curious to see them.
One of the things twitter does to you 'as an audience' is it makes you familiar with a sort of hosepipe content model where you can just look at a feed and always see new stuff. People tended to follow a lot of people on twitter. I have a hard time following people on platforms in general, because I tend to dislike being overwhelmed with 'content' - I want to see stuff people are making and sharing and talking about. But that's not typical. That's now how these systems are designed to make you experience things. They want you moving from content to content so you can get ads between them.
Be an audience. Comment on things. Thank people for what they do. When someone does something you like, engage with it to show them.
You should scroll back up and read a little higher about the emotional vulnerability, because I'm about to launch off on something on section 2, and I don't want my post to dilute that.
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yeah i don't like having become... Content.
maybe part of what i miss is the early days of twitter where it was nice to get a lot of likes because it meant people liked your funny joke. now it's more because twitter saw you as a sponge from which to wring more ad revenue from people who only follow obama and cnn.
i suspect that makes the platform become less about individual people and more about posts. who made them? well, who cares, right? as long as theyre good. do you like this
i feel like in the early days of twitter i encountered people who would follow me, sort of get to know me (not like super personally, you know, but, get a rough impression of me as an individual), and maybe be more likely to look at something i'm talking about just because i'm talking about it. but now twitter is about trying to streamline a personalized firehose of quips you'll enjoy, from whoever the fuck. because the most important recipient of your attention is coca-cola. or, i guess, nowadays, some dropshipper.
also i realize another big factor here is that i'm pouring endless amounts of time into fox flux, i reeeeally hope a nontrivial number of people buy it when it's done (i would still make it anyway but it would be nice if the years of work helped pay some bills too), and the lukewarm reception of lexy's labyrinth ā as the game i've spent the second-greatest amount of time on ā is always at the back of my mind making me nervous
