Luxurious Indifference – Watching Twitter Fail, as a Passerby

Since 2006 I have been using Twitter every single day for several hours a day, reading up to ten thousand posts per day. Every time it failed I would know about it. Weeks ago I decided to stop using Twitter, so when it fails I read about it in articles.

I am happy that I took a break from Twitter because if I was still thinking of it as a serious tool, I would feel heart break every time it failed. I would feel sad about the limit to 1000 tweet views per day, I would feel sad about the disabling of Tweetdeck. I would feel sad every time something new breaks.

There is nothing worse than being on a site that is declining, where you see functionality degrade and then disappear. The death of hope is painful. I follow the decline of Twitter, but I am not emotionally invested anymore

Worry When a Customer Stops Complaining

There is an old saying that when a customer complains, they want to keep doing business with you. The moment someone stops complaining, is the moment you are in trouble, because they have moved on. It’s when people don’t give you a hard time, that you have pushed them to breaking their relationship with your product.

People Leave Twitter for Bluesky

The Reddit AMA breakup

I saw a headline today that said that Reddit moderators are thinking of no longer hosting and facilitating AMAs. Reddit too, has pushed its most loyal users to far, so they have decided to take a break from helping the company gain value, at their expense.

The Reddit AMA Moderator Walk Out

The Absurd Limit

Imagine that you’re a social network, and imagine that people love to use your network for hours a day. Now imagine that you decide to tell them that they can only see a thousand posts before they’re cut off. In theory that could be 1 to fifteen minutes of browsing, depending on how much time they spead on each post.

For a comparison Facebook and Facebook Instagram encourage people to binge, seeing hundreds of posts that are irrelevant, to keep them around, so that they see ads. Remember a social network benefits from getting you to waste time, and failing to achieve your goal. That’s why I stopped using FB (Facebook) and IG (Instagram). My ROI, as a user, had gone down the tube.

This reminds me of the joke, “That’s not a bug, that’s a feature”.

Identi.ca

In 2008 we had identica and it was a great, open source alternative to Twitter, with no users and little engagement. It has survived to this day but it failed to gain enough traction to be a viable alternative to Twitter. Things are different today. There is a critical masss of users. This means that when social media giants misbehave people have somewhere to flee to. Users are finally empowered. We are no longer stuck under the thumb of Venture Capital Social Media. That ship has sailed and now we are empowered, once again.

Musk bought Twitter just as the social media bubble burst. Now that we have so many alternative tools to choose from social networks owned by Social media giants have no value. I hope that as Venture Capital Social Media implodes, so the world’s attitude to social media as an addiction declines. Social media is not an addiction. Social media is about people chatting with each other, nothing more. It’s the Social Media giants that pushed the Social Media addiction narrative, to behave immoraly. I’m glad to see them losing traction.

And Finally

As I stated, at the start of this post, Twitter is a sinking ship, and it would be sad, if we didn’t have the Fediverse and all of its instances to replace it. We also have BlueSky and BlueSky will thrive. It has to limit new user signups. This is a fantastic situation for them to be in, because it means that people are looking for alternatives, in several directions at once.