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Monday, November 20, 2023

A Brief Word About Dying Twitter

(image from here)

A year ago, I tweeted something about the state of Twitter, & the paraphrase is something like, "The saddest thing to me about the death of Twitter  is that it was an easy way to tell musicians I played them on the radio." I think I made a point that I am lucky that I get to choose all the music I play, & that I would hate not having that venue to tell the artists I play I'm playing them.

Sunday morning I looked at Twitter for the first time in forever. Many of the political folks I followed are long gone. I found myself reading openly racist, openly antisemitic, openly hateful stuff - tweets from accounts I don't follow - & not really seeing stuff from people I care about.

Since mine is a music show, I've followed a lot of musicians, & I guess at some point I thought that that might be insulate me from some of the ugliness. After all, what do the Nazis & the bots care about me playing some indie band?

But the other day I noticed (Twitter didn't inform me) that there had been on several of my tweets about songs I was playing new responses. There was a note that they might be offensive. Maybe they were. They were all in Russian. This is not something that had ever happened before.

In my heart I knew there would come a time when I'd be leaving what had once been a fun & vibrant place. This is not the time, but I am no longer going to live-tweet my shows. I'll keep announcing when I'm doing shows & when I know what I am going to play, I'll tag the available bands - I did that for the Dickenbock Report yesterday & I'll do it for Corporate Standardized Programming tonight. But it's just a prelude to the end. It seems to be getting worse daily. It's no place to hang out.

One of the things I do want to avoid is anything Facebook-related. I do have a Facebook account but not an Instagram account & I don't want to join Threads. I have a Bluesky Social account but it's far more of a social site even though it apparently was created by people involved with Twitter.

It's weird when something that is so routine - I have been live tweeting my shows for almost a decade - just disappears. But so be it. It's not going to get better. It's not worse the time & effort.

How I wish there were a better way to tell the musicians/artists I'm playing that I'm doing it! It was always such a thing way to show appreciation.

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