I’ve been using social media since I found Usenet as a PhD student in the early 1990s. I was teaching at Yale when Facebook arrived from Harvard (one day it wasn’t there, then suddenly it was), I remember the debates about whether blogging was a risk to one’s academic career, and I joined Instagram to follow my kid’s musical activities.
But Twitter has been my online home for the last dozen years. A combination academic water-cooler and a small soapbox when you want one. If you are not a scientist, Twitter may have looked like a source of science news but it also supported remarkably productive conversation between scientists. And it is of course the portal to “Kiwi Twitter”, a loose community tied together by quickfire commentary, word-play, and a fondness for pictures of cats and sunsets. Wordle went viral after it was discovered by local puzzlers, you stand (or at least stood) an even chance of getting a Cabinet minister to reply to comments aimed that their account, and for many people it has been a place that will help them out in a moment of need. And the usual online drama, of course, but the good always outweighed the bad. It’s a little hard to explain if you’re not there, but not unlike Irish Twitter, apparently.
Even if you don’t personally participate you may have heard that Twitter is no longer the place it once was. New owners have arrived and the neighbourhood has taken a dive — the wrong people are moving in and the lights are going out in old establishments.
I’m not a big deal on Twitter but I have a few thousand followers, and just recently it felt that many of them had moved on. So I downloaded my “engagement” data, at least for the last 12 months beyond which it seems to run out. Twitter analytics is one of the many things that is a little broken under the new management. And what I found was that the number of people looking at my Tweets had indeed fallen off a cliff. Maybe I’ve stopped saying as much, maybe the people who used to see my tweets have jumped ship, maybe the algorithm has turned its face from me. Possibly all three. It’s simultaneously nerdy and watching yourself in a mirror as you walk into a room, but here it is…