Shouting "Free bird" in a crowded theatre

If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me?

This is a little bit of an experiment. I’ve been plotting COVID graphs since March 2020, and posting them on Twitter for free. It’s been an interesting experience - I’ve met some great people, and had fun. But equally there’ve been times when I felt uncomfortably in the firing line (whether from Zero COVID people or from antivax/Let It Rip types, or hilariously sometimes from both simultaneously), and I’ve not exactly felt that Twitter had my back in giving me the tools to avoid harassment.

But I’ve always felt there was an unspoken deal: Twitter would give me a platform, and in return I would put up content that would draw people to the site. If they couldn’t see a way to monetise that (and their ad targetting has always been hilariously bad), that wasn’t my problem. I was the guy standing busking outside the restaurant, and maybe sometimes people would stop in for a meal after listening.

Now Musk has taken over, that … doesn’t feel like the deal any more. Essentially, it is clear that he’s paid far above the market rate for meme reasons, saddled the company with debt, and is doubling down with bad decisions to try to rescue it. But every step he takes moves Twitter deeper into the quicksand, and it’s not obvious to me that it doesn’t go under very fast.

For what it’s worth, the final straw for me is the threat that I have to pay $8/month, or else my content will be shadowbanned and treated as spam, as reported here

Elon just compared non-verified accounts going forward to emails in a spam folder. Sounds like you'll need to pay for Twitter Blue for people to actually read your tweets. No more of those "this site is free" jokes, folks.

It feels like it might be time to find another restaurant to play outside. I’m not going to quit Twitter altogether (I like the people, I like the memes, I like the DMs), but I think it would be foolish not to make other arrangements. It’s time to free the bird.

I think my plan for now is that long-form content is now more likely to end up on this Substack before it ends up elsewhere. That may well include graph threads, I haven’t totally decided yet. But thanks for joining me here, anyway.