Hi folks,
I’ve decided to deactivate my Twitter. There are a few reasons for this . . . first of all, it was driving me bonkers. My blood pressure is high enough.
Secondly, as a self-promotional tool, it is egregiously flawed. The followers to followed ratio makes it so that it is nearly impossible to follow a bunch of people without being seen as a spam bot, which means that each account needs a net positive followers to followed ratio, and thus it is mathematically impossible for all accounts to possess a net positive ratio. This zero-sum game results in a lot of duplicitous behavior, like “Twitter churn,” which is the process of following people and then unfollowing them a few days later after they’ve followed you back. It’s all nonsense, and I’m not going to engage in that kind of behavior.
Yet Twitter rewards exactly that kind of profile, since it bestows legitimacy on those accounts with large followings and casts suspicion on those without an aggressively large following. In theory this promotes the marketplace of ideas by making it easy to follow and unfollow people, but in practice it elevates a small number of voices and empowers a tsunami of bots and trolls who can follow each other over a couple of days, creating algorithmically beefy accounts and thereby bypassing Twitter’s supposedly impartial terms of service.
Have you ever seen the Meow Meow Beanz episode of Community?
Twitter is basically that.
Anyway, if you need up-to-the-minute updates on what I’m doing, you should sign up for this blog! Or if you’re one of the few people on Twitter I’ve met over the past few months, please follow me on Instagram (lucketthistory), send me an email (my IG username @ gmail), Facebook me, or heck . . . follow this blog!
In the meantime, my wife seems to do a better job of not getting too engaged when on Twitter. Maybe she’d be willing to open an account for me and run it on my behalf?
Honey?
