And Now This…

News broke yesterday that Lex Luthor is going to buy Twitter. You may be able to tell that I have no particular fondness for the guy, but I’m also watching with interest as everyone claims loudly how they’re leaving, without, you know, actually leaving. This panic reminds me a lot of when Yahoo bought tumblr— the platform changed, but it’s still there, and it’s weirder than ever. Whether any of that will happen to twitter, which has had a lot more broad social clout since it hit its stride in the early 2010s, has yet to be seen.

The thing is, whenever anyone has anything interesting to say on Twitter, it gets chopped up into threads, sometimes dozens-long, and I always think to myself, “geez, why don’t you just write a blog post?”

There are reasons of course. I still blame the death of blogging as a broad practice largely on Google and Digg killing the two really-really-good RSS readers, which made it a lot harder to digest the disparate voices I wanted to hear from. Further, social media platforms discourage linking away because they only make money if you stay on the platform. So tweets with outbound links, or facebook posts with outbound links, or whatever, don’t get shown to as many people as tweets with multiples of replies. It’s algorithmically advantageous to thread what should be a blog post.

Good for robots, bad for people.

And I think the internet is better when we prioritize people.

As such, you may have noticed a recent uptick in the number of blog posts I’ve been making lately. I’ve also recently purchased a feed reader that is well reviewed for Mac called Reeder 5.

“But Veronica,” I hear no one say “isn’t blogging completely self-indulgent and doesn’t it bother you that nobody is likely to come read your blog?” Look pal, I’ve been shouting into the void for over 20 years with a readership in the single digits, regardless of which platform I’m doing it on. Why’s that suddenly going to stop me?

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