My Twitter replacement

Those who have been following the saga of social media for a while will know that Twitter is a right old mess right now. Between Elon Musk’s incredible ego and a series of bizarre policy changes and introductions (most of which are likely related to Musk’s ego in some form or another) it’s certainly been interesting to watch the world’s most popular social media platform (for how much longer?) go through some trials and tribulations.

But those of you who have been following me for a while will know that Twitter hasn’t been much fun for a long time now. When I first joined (which must have been around 2007 or so, maybe?) it was a great place to make new friends, enjoy good conversation and just generally have a good time. But as the years have gone on — and particularly since the significant online upheavals that can be at least partly attributed to the “Gamergate” mess of 2014 — it’s become a less and less desirable hangout, for a variety of reasons.

Chief among them for me is the combative, confrontational tone the site as a whole has taken on. While it is still possible to have civil conversations there, it feels like it’s much more likely that if you post an opinion of your own someone will come along and shout it down before long. Even if your opinion is not, in the grand scheme of things, particularly important or worth getting upset over.

Anger seems to be the default state for many posters on Twitter, and this is often expressed through some seriously unpleasant behaviour. Anyone who is into Japanese games, for example, will doubtless have seen the disgusting vitriol that gets thrown the way of localisation staff (more specifically, female localisation staff) on a fairly regular basis, regardless of whether or not any “mistakes” have been made. And the same is true in all fields; the quote-tweet dunk is a universal constant, and it does not make for a friendly environment where one wants to hang out.

But alongside all this, Twitter itself has been changing in functional, mechanical terms. The rise of “The Algorithm” on all manner of social sites — with the most notorious being YouTube, of course — has meant that no longer can you count on your social media experience being your own, if indeed it ever was. Rather than showing you the things that your friends have been posting in the order that they were posted, you now get shit you didn’t sign up for pushed into your feed as “recommendations”, based on the ill-defined assumptions that Twitter makes about “quality content”.

I never signed up to Twitter for “quality content”. I signed up to chat with folks from a forum we all used to frequent that we weren’t able to use any more due to the site’s closure. That’s all I really wanted. And that’s emphatically not what the site provides these days.

So between the change in atmosphere, the change in the way the whole site works and the whole Musk fiasco, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s simply not worth wasting time pissing around on Twitter any more — if indeed it ever was. Rather, I think it’s high time that I brought this blog back, since it’s a much better means for me to express myself — plus the comments section is a much nicer way to hold a conversation in most cases. (Unless those people find their way here, but you know how it is.)

So that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll be keeping my Twitter account open because it’s still useful for things like news aggregation and PR contacts, but pretty much all I’ll be posting on there is links to stuff I’ve done, either for work or for pleasure. When I want to actually talk about something, I’ll do it here, like in the good old days.

I’m not making any grand promises about posting frequency or anything like that, this is just going to be an “as and when I feel like it” sort of thing. I’m also not going to commit to doing silly comics or anything, even though I know one particular reader (whom I hope is doing well, given that I haven’t heard from her for a while) is a big fan! This is my scratch pad, my brain dump and my place to express myself. No “algorithm” rules the roost here, and as such it’s a much better means of getting to know me than the toxic bird site.

So see you around here, I hope!