Twitter says it's no longer filtering tweets from private, free individual accounts out of my feed. So why is my Twitter feed still a lot of slick corporate rubbish full of graphics?--Did I say that?--Yes, I said that. The first accounts I followed on Twitter were newspaper accounts. For years I used Twitter mainly for the links to headline news from around the world. The real Washington Post and Times, which I would read every day if I still got them on the same day, and the real New York Times and Los Angeles Times and Guardian and other newspapers from far-away places, which I would read every week or two if they came free in the mail, would not reach me on the day they're printed. The headlines from all those papers do, via Twitter. I'd miss the headlines, too, if they disappeared, but a funny thing happens when I open Twitter lately. I'm looking for my Tweeps, who were censored en masse a few weeks ago. A respectable newspaper tweets a legitimate news headline--freak weather here, celebrity funeral there--and I catch myself thinking "Oh turn it off, who cares if some movie star's dead, WHAT'S HAPPENING TO TRACY DOE?" Real news items blur together with ad-garbage in my mind as I scan for Tweeps' tweets and find jolly few of them.
Well, we've had a holiday weekend. Despite the officially solemn nature of Memorial Day, the timing works against solemnity. Most Americans now pay people to tend graves and, even if people do trudge out to lay a wreath on a stone and remember a grandparent, in the morning, mostly Memorial Day weekend is about picnics, boats, and barbecues. When the weather is favorable, as in much of the U.S. it has been, people take week-long vacations, go to the beach or the mountains, and unplug. This accounts for some of the drop in individual Twitter activity...but not all of it.
When people opened New Twitter and saw that their Tweeps had been declared "low-quality" because they weren't paying to advertise their store locations on the Internet, we were insulted. Admit it, Dorsey, that's an insult.
Current reality is that in much of the United States, certainly in my home town, even most of the private businesses aren't paying to maintain phone lines that any random person can call, any more. Blame the telephone companies that raised monthly fees, allowed employees to talk back to customers, failed to maintain public computer centers, then left business phone numbers out of the local phone directories, all of which made people feel that paying a monthly phone bill was more trouble than it was worth. If you don't have a physical store that takes a lot of phone orders, you don't have a phone line, any more. (I'm sitting in a cafe that does have a phone line, looking out toward a row of businesses: one still has a phone, four don't; one has a phone line but makes and takes calls only for about an hour a day, only three days a week.) Individuals have cell phones. Most of those cell phones don't pick up most of the signals for ordinary conversation-type calls during the warmer two-thirds of the year. Probably a majority of them are either tax-subsidized "Obamaphones," for which the service can hardly aspire to reach the level of "pathetic," or else very fancy "smart phones" purchased by their children, for people who want to live alone in their own homes after age 80, most of whom have never figured out how to use even the normal phone functions on their "smart phones." (Two of my elders, after trying to call and chat with each other for about a year, broke down and disclosed their phone numbers to me in hopes that I could make it possible for them to call each other. I got each of their phone numbers plugged into the other's phone. I've yet to hear whether they've succeeded in calling each other and making conversation, the way they used to do every day when they were paying for traditional wall-mounted phone lines.) Most of the cell phones that are actually being used run on prepaid minute plans, and if you waste a phone minute even on social pleasantries when talking to a friend, you are likely to be punished by having your calls ignored when they do get through, the next time you try to call that friend. New phone etiquette bars the older conventional "How are you all doing?--Well, Grandpa's out of the hospital, Grandma's still trying to get the sink re-plumbed, etc. etc. etc.--Well my mother-in-law's still sightseeing in Italy, Grandma's put the car up for sale, etc. etc. etc.," that used to while away a happy half-hour or an hour before any two Southerners got to the actual reason for a phone call. Now, when a friend's call does get through, a polite conversation sounds like "I'm at the corner."--"Right."--Click!
So I've received a few plaintive letters and e-mails lately from people who "would like to talk about this or that, but don't have a phone number for you." One of them appeared to have been hand-typed by one of Congressman Griffith's office staff. And if I still had a phone they could call, I would take the time to talk about bills with Congressman Griffith's office staff. Actually I know a few Republicans who would be chuffed to host a phone date for me with Congressman Griffith's office staff--but even the ones who still maintain phone lines that reliably receive incoming calls, for no extra charge, would have to schedule time in advance to be nearby when those phones ring. Telephone culture has changed a great deal in my lifetime. Now I'm not even in a super-frugal minority when I say: I don't have, and unless a client pays for it I probably will never have, a phone that people can call.
I can just see Twitter's corporate sponsors' eyes crinkling and teeth clenching with frustration. "But now that everybody carries a cell phone, we should be able to bombard everybody with sales calls, all the time!" I saw an advertisement yesterday--"Why let your message be lost among 800 e-mails? Let us help you send text messages directly to people's cell phones!" No waaay. People have to pay for unwelcome text messages and, if businesses do start advertising by text messaging on a large scale, next year's legislature will undoubtedly have to choose one of a dozen different bills, by popular demand, imposing a fine on anyone who sends unwanted text messages to private people's cell phones. You can't communicate with me by phone, people. Deal with it. Even if you are one of a few stores I've invited to e-mail me notices of what's going on sale from week to week--and, funnily enough, for some reason those e-mails never have come through; try typing text only, with no live links and no pictures--that in no way implies that I'm willing to pay actual money for letting you waste expensive cell phone minutes, or memory, either, for that matter, are you out of your flippin' MINDS?!
So, no, there is not and will never be a live phone number connected to my Twitter account. Nor to most of my Tweeps' accounts. Calling us "low-quality" for that reason is an open, shameless, trashy insult. Twitter might as well add remarks about our mothers to our account pages. And so, not too surprisingly, after people went to their account pages and saw that, people are staying away from Twitter in droves.
What could Twitter possibly do to make up for that? I have no idea. I've continued to use Twitter, in spare minutes while watching for developments; but then, I'm both a writer and an activist, so I've grown a few emotional calluses my Tweeps apparently lack. I don't know how much grovelling Twitter needs to do to get them back, but my advice would be for Jack Dorsey to maintain contact between his forehead and the floor or ground, when communicating with the private free users who are Twitter's reason for existing, throughout the next year or two.
Maybe a campaign of segregating accounts associated with publicly traded corporations, identifying them as "lowest-quality accounts," might help. Lowest-quality accounts' home pages should feature headers continually reminding the corporate employees, "You are PAYING for the privilege of interacting with your Lord and Master the Honorable Prospective Customer." Every time these wretched people log into their lowest-quality accounts, at the top of the page they should see a "Promoted Tweet" from a private individual whose account Twitter insulted this spring, and until they have responded to that tweet to the satisfaction of that private individual, even though they're paying, the lowest-quality accounts' tweets should not be visible to anyone else. The purpose of this rigmarole would be to make it clear to the corporate social media consultants that old-school social bullying is no longer an acceptable way to advertise anything. Nobody has to read what you're saying about your product, Sony, Burlington, Zulily et al. You have to type, by hand, "Thank you for sharing your lovely flower picture. Please may I share a picture of this cell phone or guitar or raincoat or whatever else I'm selling?" And you have to wait, lowest-quality account that you are, for the Honorable Prospective Customer's permission to do that.
Y'know, before this censorship deal came out, I had no particular feelings toward Merck. Companies make mistakes. Some companies' mistakes are more disastrous than others. If the Ace Gift & Toy Company sells you a yo-yo that fails to yo properly, you may or may not bother demanding your money back, or just tell the kids to let that be a lesson to them not to spend money on stupid toys. When Toyota had to recall some cars because the rather endearing fast acceleration feature had got out of hand and become dangerous, that didn't make me feel that all Toyota cars are unsafe even when stalled at intersections and need to be banned. I imagine that Boeing, which built a lot of good planes before building a few not-so-good planes, is building good planes again by now. I imagine that Toshiba, which built laptops that were worth their little weight in gold before building some not-so-good laptops and then a few laptops with a flaw that allowed some of them to explode from overheating, is building decent laptops again by now. And I would have assumed that Merck, which unfortunately sent out a batch of vaccines that were contaminated with something that caused a few patients to die, would have reacted in a normal way--huge insurance-funded payoffs to the bereaved, recall of that batch of vaccine, destruction of the equipment on which it was manufactured, probably razing that wing of that building to the ground, and then rebuilding and getting back to producing safer vaccines...if Merck hadn't publicized that, instead, it was demanding censorship of complaints about its toxic contaminated vaccines, even to the point of advocating discrimination against entire religious groups.
Well, now I hate Merck. I'm neither a Jew nor a Jehovah's Witness but I am an American. Like most Americans I feel some sympathy even for Jehovah's Witnesses, and quite a lot of sympathy for Jews, who don't even go around annoying people with silly little tracts. Scum who bash either of those religious groups? Y'mean our fathers and grandfathers did not all but literally pound them into the ground, driving them into their underground bunkers to commit suicide, in 1945? Hey, we have a job to finish here!
By "lowest-quality tweets" I mean the ones from the stores that sell legitimate merchandise I don't happen to be buying. I do not mean Merck, and I do not mean Bayer, and I do not mean Lilly. Some things need to be beaten into the ground like the venomous snakes they're worse than.
As of yesterday Twitter was still "promoting" tweets from loathsome corporations, my Tweeps were not on Twitter, and a Bayer shill whose Twitter name is @29aatea was gloating (in French) "The anxiety-producing tweets are going to disappear." Rrreally? Ecoute bien, mon petit...Twitter may well disappear; if it continues to consist of one big clamor of news reports and advertisements screaming at each other, with no audience listening to either, Twitter will disappear. I've already checked out two web sites that aren't well enough designed to displace Twitter, but honestly, if Google + or even Tsu came back to life tomorrow, New Twitter would be dead by Monday. An intelligent adult has seriously proposed Mylots as capable of displacing New Twitter. I don't think Mylots can, but if Live Journal can keep its glitches from popping up every day or two, Live Journal could easily displace New Twitter.
So, yes, #GlyphosateAwareness is going to e-mail. I'm working on that today. I expect most of our e-mail will go directly into people's Bacon Folders.
If you don't have a Bacon Folder set up, here's my rant about why everybody needs one:
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2016/07/unplugging-is-vacation.html
And this long rant about how to keep your bacony e-mail out of the Spam Folder is still something several correspondents need to heed, too:
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/01/how-or-how-not-to-turn-your-bacon-into.html
Anyway: In the post-Twitter world I may resume posting Link Logs as LJ blog posts, "friends-only" until they're sponsored, at which point they'll appear here. Another blog idea I've been mulling for a while, because some correspondents like it and others will haaate it, may spin off into a separate blog and generate a separate e-mail list: that's the one where I (and you, if you feel so inclined) blog our way through the Bible in the "daily devotional" format (limited to one printed page per day, traditionally a standard book page with room for 200 to 300 words).
I'm off to work on the e-mail chore now. I promise a maximum of one pithy, linky glyphosate-related batch e-mail per week. I promise not to send out e-mails I would not want to receive...no hype, no duns, no suggested contributions through sites that demand access to your Paypal password. The best way to help expand Glyphosate Awareness to the masses, should you feel called to do so, is to send a U.S. postal money order to the Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, Gate City. All funds raised for Glyphosate Awareness will be used exclusively for printing and mailing newsletters to people who don't do e-mail. I encourage sharing everything we learn about glyphosate with your elected officials and their staff, and may print out postcards for that purpose, but Glyphosate Awareness seeks to influence elected officials by reason alone--no "schmoozing."
Sadly, because already I sorely miss Twitter...
Today's Amazon link is a Very First Book on communication, in audio format for those who don't know how to read, recommended to certain geeks with names like Dorsey who seem to need it.
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