Thread by @sfmnemonic

ROUGH TWEETMENT: A Mini-Essay Composed This Morning. Let me explain why Twitter’s shambolic lurches toward further decline make it difficult for me ever to justify paying for any tier of the service. 1/20

I should begin by saying that if you had told me only two or three years ago that I would have to pay eight dollars a month for Twitter and Tweetdeck as a service, I might have agreed to do it. 2/20

But now I cannot ethically justify paying even eight dollars a month for a service enhancement like Tweetdeck, which is about to be moved behind the Twitter paywall for no good reason. 3/20

I have used Twitter a lot for more than a decade, and it has expanded my impact and served me professionally (for the most part). 4/20

Perhaps most important, it has improved my writing by making it punchier than I otherwise am inclined to make it. I don’t have a “tight five” for any standup act, but I have clearer ideas about how to develop my material should I choose to retire into a career as a comedian. 5/20

My “natural” writing is discursive—more paragraph- than sentence-oriented—what you’d expect given the kind of prose I read. Twitter imposed some (though maybe not enough) self-discipline. Joking on Twitter has taught me a lot about how to structure one-liners. 6/20

It also has served me psychologically—giving me a place to express both joy and despair, and to air my grievances, and to simply practice and sharpen my writing. 7/20

But the decline in reliability of Twitter over the last year, combined with some clear signs that top leadership has no idea what it’s doing in trying to create revenue streams and improve service—has actually damaged revenue streams and hobbled the service. 8/20

Twitter now makes me feel as if subscribing to the service (which, as I've outlined, has been valuable to me from time to time) would be rewarding bad leadership and overall bad behavior. 9/20

In addition, and this counts for a lot, I’d be labelled with a Blue Check that signals that I’m paying to be here, and that may be taken to signal approval of what Twitter leadership has been doing. 10/20

(Please note that I don’t judge “professional” accounts with Blue Checks in this way—I know you folks all have jobs to do. But mine is not a professional account.) 11/20

I’m not declaring my departure—a kind of slamming the door approach that I think almost invariably works less well than one might hope in expressing much of anything. h/t Eric Berne, MD. 12/20

But I’m actively exploring for other choices, and the decision to break Tweetdeck (whether intentional or otherwise) makes Twitter so much less pleasant for me. 13/20

Nowadays, in the absence of Tweetdeck’s ordering structure, Twitter keeps surprising me with toxic streams of content that I mostly don’t need to see and that mostly (and sadly) are not well-written or well-reasoned enough for me to want to engage with them anyway. 14/20

So I can’t make myself pay for Twitter, even at a low level, in the absence of some strong sign that Twitter’s leadership wants to improve the service rather than strip-mine its already scarred landscape. 15/20

That Tweetdeck is about to be moved behind Twitter’s paywall makes clear that strip-mining is now company policy. I can’t ethically choose even to *seem* to show support for that policy. 16/20

To be absolutely clear—I’m not “logging off” of Twitter, or walking away in a huff, or anything like that. At the same time, if I did something that got me banned from Twitter, I wouldn’t engage in any Herculean effort to stay. 17/20

I will tell you, though, my one little secret that has improved my self-discipline here. I use a bot service called Semiphemeral (Google it) that deletes my old tweets and other responses that don’t get read above a certain threshold. 18/20

Semiphemeral is worth giving some money to if you want your own feed to look a bit shinier, more polished, and more curated. I heartily recommend Semiphemeral. 19/20

For now, you can continue to reach me here, although maybe less reliably over time. Best of luck to all of you friends (and principled opponents). You’ve made me smarter, and also—although you may not have been able to tell—a better person. 20/20