So you may have heard by now that Twitter has been purchased by some annoying, pasty billionaire weirdo who has no idea why Twitter worked in the first place or what he wants to do with it other than let Donald Trump back on, which is not a promising start. As a result, a fair number of people have jumped ship. My follower count has been plummeting like Wile E. Coyote falling off a cliff. 

And this sucks, because I like Twitter. I am not kidding when I say whatever success I’ve achieved as a writer is about 95% due to the opportunities I originally learned about there. I found out about Pitch Wars on Twitter. I connected with the publisher of my first novel via #SFFPit. Both my pro-level short fiction sales happened because I saw the submission calls on Twitter.

And it’s been a reliable marketing tool for Tidepool. Whenever I Tweet about the book or participate in Gabino Iglesias’s #FridayReads threads, I notice a bump in the book’s Amazon sales ranking. Those of us who own or publish with small presses have found it invaluable for connecting with each other and promoting our work. It’s just super-great that a guy with billions of dollars is fixing to ruin that for us. 

I’ve also had fun talking to writers and other people all over the world. It’s been a great way to keep up with people I’ve met in person at conferences and conventions. I think it kept a lot of us from feeling completely alone during the quarantine. 

Instagram is OK but I dislike the inability to make links. What the hell was the thought process behind “We’ll make a social media app for this great interlinked Internet and fix it so you can’t hyperlink anything”? I mostly stay off Facebook, which has been Bad Take Central for years now. TikTok is a scourge that should be burned off the face of the planet, IMO; I wish to hell some pasty billionaire weirdo would take over that platform and run it into the ground. I have never quite gotten the hang of Discord. Twitter has been the one social media platform where I feel truly comfortable, and I’ve done a lot of work to build my following there.

So I really don’t want to leave Twitter, and have no plans of doing so unless its new owner does something exceptionally egregious. Which he just might. His current plan to bury users who don’t subscribe to his new monthly blue check program, thus making posts from non-blue check folks really hard to find, could be the last straw for me. 

Author Brian Keene has started up an old school message board over at https://thekeenedom.freeforums.net and a fair number of horror folk, including me, have begun congregating there. There are discussions about horror (and general media) of all kinds, and several boards devoted to specific creators. If Twitter should become more trouble than it’s worth, or if it just vanishes in a giant virtual mushroom cloud one day, you’ll likely find me there. 

Mostly, I’m hoping the pasty weirdo gets bored with Twitter, offloads it, and takes his ego somewhere else. But we’ll see.