Elon Musk and the Twitter meltdown have taught us a needed lesson. That lesson is that it’s extremely unwise to build our presence on a social media platform.
It Was Always a Bad Idea
In a recent blog post, Joe Moyer highlights a post by Brent Simmons, titled “After Twitter.” In his post, Simmons argues that the dominance of Twitter has always been a bad idea:
“The internet’s town square should never have been one specific website with its own specific rules and incentives. It should have been, and should be, the web itself.
Having one entity own and police that square could only deform the worldwide conversation, to disastrous ends, even with the smartest and most humane people at work.
I resented Twitter because it had become mandatory, because it had become the one place. And I resented it because it seemed to subdue the creative energy of the web.”
Too many creative people, writers, content creators, podcasters, and artists have not bothered to set up their own presence on the web with their own website. Rather, they allowed themselves to become dependent on a social media platform they had no control over.
There were always serious problems with letting a social media platform become your voice:
- You have no control over your presence or your material. Someone else has total control over your voice. If they decide for whatever reason or no reason to shut you down, they have the arbitrary right to terminate you, with no appeal process. They own you.
- You do a disservice to your followers. It’s common knowledge that social media sites have one real goal: increasing their profits. The more people use them and the longer they stay, the more money they make. Sites are specifically engineered to manipulate human weaknesses to suck people in and keep them in as long as possible, making them addicted to their platform. The social media platform is not the product; the people are the product.
- We write about the dangers of social media, and then we turn around and actively participate in it and encourage our followers to join us there. Why would we want to do the marketing work for the platform and draw more people in for them to exploit? Are we helping or harming our followers?
Recognizing a New Opportunity
It’s time to rebuild in the free and open space of the web. Creatives need to have their own spaces they control, and not be dependent on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
As Brent Simmons writes,
With the fall of the Twitter consensus I am energized. I remember what it was like in the 2000s; I remember the liveliness and sparkle of those days on the web…The web is wide open again, for the first time in what feels like forever.”
Joe Moyer also shares his optimism:
Maybe one positive from this shift will be a resurgence in blogs and websites with valuable and engaging content and ideas. Either way, I probably won’t be jumping on Twitter anytime soon.
I share their optimism and their call for owning your space on the web.
Instead of just whining about Elon Musk and Twitter, I hope that the Twitter meltdown will prompt creatives to rethink past practices, recognize the danger of using social media platforms, and build their own platforms on the web. A following can still be built using web links and RSS feeds. If a forum is desired, so followers can interact, there are off-the-shelf solutions available.
Twitter, Facebook, etc. need you. You don’t need them to have a voice.