Why Writers Hate All These Twitter Alternatives (Hint: It's Because They're Useless)

If you exist on the Internet today, then you are likely well aware of the ongoing downfall of Twitter. One of the major social media websites with years of growth behind it, the site was bought by Elon Musk, who has been doing almost everything in his power to light it on fire, and drive it off a cliff.

In the wake of all of Musk's bad decisions, a slew of other social media sites and platforms have sprung into action, trying to claim the real estate that Twitter has lost. And while I definitely endorse more social media platforms existing, I wanted to take a moment to explain something that a lot of people seem confused by. Because a majority of the challengers to Twitter's throne have tidal waves of hype behind them... but if you're a creator, they're utterly useless for your needs.

Buckle up folks, this one is gonna be depressing.

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The Wrong Tools For The Wrong Job

There have been dozens of sites and platforms that folks have gone to in the wake of Musk's... let's call them decisions regarding Twitter. Facebook created Threads, Discord has exploded in popularity, Mastodon has trampled onto the scene, and Blue.Sky has gotten leagues of subscribers all its own. Hell, even Tumblr saw a lurch in popularity in the wake of the Twitter disaster. And those are just some of the alternatives that have come on the scene.

With all of those choices, why would anyone actually stay on Twitter and keep playing music on a sinking ship, which seems to be the choice that a majority of creators have made?

Because these new tools simply don't do what the old one did.

To answer that question, I need to explain what Twitter did from the perspective of a creator.

First and foremost, Twitter had an established audience, and established communities. More importantly, it allowed you to speak directly to your audience, and to establish a rapport with them. Most importantly, though, Twitter had something called discoverability. For those who've never heard the term before, discoverability is the ability for your content to be found (or "discovered") by people you don't have a pre-existing connection to. Discoverability is what allows your post to grow, and spread, letting you go viral across a platform if people keep reacting to it.

While there are a lot of websites and platforms trying to fill this gap, they have none of these things. Worse, many of them are designed specifically so that they will never have these things.

Take Discord and Blue.Sky, for example. These platforms are designed specifically so that you can curate your own feed, and avoid coming into contact with subjects and types of content you wish to avoid. From a user perspective, this may be seen as an advantage, because now you have the ability to insulate yourself from stuff you don't want to cross paths with. From a creator perspective, though, it means that you have a serious handicap to overcome, because you need to either find (or somehow make) a community that is so large that its members can help support your work all on their own, or you need to somehow find a huge collection of such communities, and stitch together a functional quilt out of them all, while then posting in each and every one of them as often as you can (which can rapidly eat up hours of your time every, single day). When you add in the relative youth of these sites and platforms (at least when compared with older sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc.), and the fact that communities to help support creators are not as established on them (if they exist at all), they really aren't doing you any favors.

In short, to use these platforms, you would have to put in significantly more effort, with the likelihood that your efforts are going to generate much smaller results, if they generate any results at all. Because these platforms, simply put, do not do what Twitter did, or what Facebook, Reddit, and other established social media sites do. These sites instead largely operate as a series of closed rooms that explicitly stop fires from passing from one section to another... but as creators, we need the potential that our content will grow and spread, otherwise the embers will be smothered before we even get started.

Tumblr is the one exception... honestly, it just doesn't have the interaction and audience it would need to be what it once was.

Help Keep The Fires Going!

The issue that a lot of creators are facing these days is that algorithms in general, and social media in particular, throttle our signals to the point where it's basically impossible to be successful just making posts all on our own. And in a world where more and more platforms are moving away from discoverability, and forcing people to pay if they want their posts to be seen, we need all the help we can get.

In short, we need help from folks like you. The audience. Our followers.

I'm helping!

There are only so many posts we can make, so many websites we can join, and so many platforms we can curate. We can't do this alone... but you can help us. Because every time you leave a heart on a post, every time you share something, and every time you leave a comment or review, it helps boost the signal, and it tells those same algorithms that we have made something that other people should see. And every time you share our content in a closed group that we couldn't normally reach, you put our stuff in front of people who might otherwise never hear of us.

So if you want to help, that's how you can throw us a life preserver so we can keep treading water, and making more stuff for all of you to enjoy!

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Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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