I’ve been watching all the various posts about the impending demise of Twitter for the past week or so. Twitter for me was at its best during the early 2010s and I know that I got connections and friends via the community I was a part of at that time. I pulled way back from the platform in 2017. A year or more ago, I deleted all of my tweets and stopped following everyone but agencies and local news orgs that I find helpful to get info from quickly, especially during fire season.
But I’ve seen a lot of great posts on the subject and, to my delight, a few of the RSS feeds that haven’t had new content in my reader for a while had posts this week. I’ll link to two that I’ve found particularly interesting, but there are a lot of people talking about this if you look for it. I do like that there is thinking going on and people are talking about it on their blogs.
If you leave Twitter for less obvious places, fewer eyeballs will see your work; but if people have to make a bit of an effort to find what you write, they’re far more likely to be intelligent and receptive readers than the average Twitter user.
And Alan Jacobs goes on to say this and I love it:
We all need to stop thinking arithmetically. For good and for ill, the people who make the most significant impact on the world are those who pursue what Milton called “fit audience though few.” Very few people have read Wang Huning’s academic writings, but he directs the ideological program of the Chinese Communist Party. A far more positive example, from Eno: “The first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years. Yet … everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.”
Maybe audience isn’t the goal? I can trace only one significant career event that occurred because of my blog, not my Twitter presence, but my blog. And that was a turning point for me, in a huge way, but it was the slow writing that got me there, not the pithy short thoughts.
Austin Kleon wrote a short post that talks more about audience and what that means as an independent artist. I love the clips he shows (from Twitter no less) that illustrate that growth demands we give our all to these companies and welp, maybe that’s not a good idea.
Unlike many folks, I’m not looking for a replacement for Twitter. And, to be honest, I’ve deleted all my content from Instagram too. I’m not sure helping these companies make money is good for me, so I’ve been searching for alternatives to find interesting things on the topics I’m into. To my delight there are a lot of folks still blogging about the things they do and I love it.