Not even for minor-Twitter-celebrities like me who have much larger followings on the site than they would have anywhere else.Īnd that’s because Twitter is becoming a ghost town. Mastodon is growing too (though they don’t provide comparable analytics, and the user experience probably benefits from having fewer gamified metrics.). What’s more, Substack is growing, while Twitter is shrinking. If I’m getting 2,000-3,000 views through Twitter, and ~2,300 views through Substack’s email distribution, then my Substack has already reached the same effective size as my Twitter following. Everyone presumably at least views the headline, whether they open and read the article or not. My posts appear in the inboxes of all those subscribers. I have a bit more than 2,300 Substack subscribers. Here’s where we get to the back-of-the-envelope math: ![]() And that reduced-megaphone turns out to be a lot less irreplaceable. It’s seen by the subset of those 42,000 people that happen to be staring at Twitter’s chronological timeline at the time I send the tweet, plus anyone who is shown the tweet through Twitter’s algorithmic timeline. When I tweet something, it isn’t actually viewed by 42,000 individuals. Mass-scale coordination games are not easy to solve.)īut that number - 42,000 Twitter followers - has begun to seem hollow. Twitter is the solution to a coordination game. The value of Twitter is derived from the number of people who are also using it. (This is a classic “network effects” story. That’s where people will see it and share it. But if I want to promote a new essay that I’ve written, Twitter is my bread and butter. Mastodon is fun! It kind of has the vibe of Twitter circa 2011. On paper at least, it makes Twitter a much larger and more valuable megaphone than I am likely to have anywhere else. That number has held pretty steady ever since - today I have around 42,000. After his weeklong tantrum was over, I had around 40,000 Twitter followers. Before Bret Stephens got mad and wrote to my provost, I had about 9,000 followers on the platform. The “lightning” in this case, was the whole “Bretbug” dustup back in August 2019. I will be one of the last people to leave Twitter. ![]() One of my comments became the headline: “ I caught lightning in a bottle. ![]() A couple months ago, I spoke with Nancy Scola for her story about why DC-types can’t seem to quit Twitter.
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