ok so like... i get worried about leaving twitter or it falling apart because it's been my main source of ~Online Engagement~ for plugging my art and my cool things i do and my various crowdfund efforts. for years now that's been the case. but then i read some stuff about internal twitter reporting:
Twitter is struggling to keep its most active users - who are vital to the business - engaged... These "heavy tweeters" account for less than 10% of monthly overall users but generate 90% of all tweets and half of global revenue. Heavy tweeters have been in "absolute decline" since the pandemic began, a Twitter researcher wrote in an internal document titled 'Where did the Tweeters Go?'
A 'heavy tweeter' is defined as someone who logs in to Twitter six or seven days a week and tweets about three to four times a week, the document said.
really? that's the criteria for a heavy tweeter?? that's nothing compared to the importance of this shit i've got built up in my head. i hate being on twitter but i used to tell myself it was worth it for like, the exposure or whatever. what exposure?? barely anyone's using it lol. i used to enjoy it, met some great people there, but now i don't. seems like i'm not alone
it's always been a bit of a cesspool but it didn't used to be this bad. and now people are finally getting sick of it. but now i don't have to worry about it since it seems like twitter wasn't that huge of a deal anyway.
i'm realizing now that word of mouth has always gotten me further than any tweet i ever made. luckily that works on all platforms
People like to think that the goal of Twitter is to go viral, but that's actually the worst outcome possible. Going viral on Twitter means that a bunch of randos strip out all context from your post and read it in the worst way possible. It's much nicer here, where we can actually build community in the tags.
Fuck, man. Yeah. I've been on there long enough to remember when "going viral" meant getting like 700 likes and there was a chance Ashton Kutcher, or, fucking, Wil Wheaton might see your shit. "Going viral" on early Twitter was something you could sometimes reasonably expect to benefit you in some way if you had some kind of media presence to boost. Some accounts even got, like, non-grifting CAREERS started off of doing popular tweets. Admittedly it was mostly stuff like Shit My Dad Says, but I can think of a LOT of good working journalists and comedy writers who built their early careers on Twitter clout.
Nowadays if I have a thread on my public dev account go over 100 likes my stomach starts tying itself in knots because I know my shit has officially exited the circle of people I can trust to read it and respond in good faith and I'm going to start getting replies from indignant randos infuriated that I didn't fit every imaginable caveat into 280 characters. And it doesn't even fuckin matter how popular my tweets get any more, it has ZERO effect on how many people are buying my game or supporting me on Patreon. All going viral on Twitter means nowadays is that maybe a 27-year-old with a Piccrew avatar and the social conditioning of a 13-year-old will decide I deserve to be beheaded for posting a thread about how the algorithm isn't hiding your art posts because you linked to an InPrint store.
Like I said I've been On There since... 2008? 2009? And have absolutely benefitted from meeting lots of great people and had career opportunities open up because of my presence there etc etc etc. But I also gotta be clearheaded about the state of things on the platform now, and the state of things is Not Good.
