- Investigate the alternatives that are open to readers by default. Facebook and friends also make it hard for casual visitors to see messages without logging in. Many brands have flocked to Mastodon, Micro.blog, and newer services like Bluesky.
- Track your engagement numbers. If Twitter still reports a similar number of views for your messages after making them inaccessible to 90% of the world, those statistics are probably fake.
- Blogs and newsletters still exist, and you have complete control over them. Consider communicating with your most loyal followers over open, easy-to-use channels that everyone can access.
- And finally, start working on your Twitter exit strategy. As the site continues to remove the guardrails that kept it relatively civil and brand-safe, it’s only going to become a worse place to hang out.
Twitter went dark. Now what?
Twitter is in a race with Reddit to see who can ruin their service more quickly. That’s the simplest explanation I have for Twitter’s change today that hides all of their users’ posts behind a login page. Until today, you could still view a favorite company’s messages, or a sport team’s highlights, or an interesting author’s opinions, without logging on to the site. If you wanted to interact with that page by liking a post or replying to it, you needed an account. It was free to view those posts, though. And now, it’s not.
For end users, this immediately devalues Twitter as a way to casually catch up with public figures. For those public figures, this immediately devalues Twitter as a way to broadcast messages to the world. The service still has many users today, of course, and those people won’t go away immediately. But most recent public estimates say that Twitter has about 400 million users, or about 1/10th of the world’s online population. Assuming that all of those accounts are real people, which is a giant assumption, that means about 90% of the world can’t see those messages anymore.
A couple of pieces of free advice for people and organizations still posting to Twitter:
Quitting Reddit
I’ve spent way more time on Reddit than I should have. I justified it to myself by saying it was a great way to stay current on news and technology trends. Really, it was just a slow drip of tiny endorphin hits that felt good but ultimately didn’t make my life better.
Thanks to Reddit CEO Steve Huffman’s ham-fisted community management and the resulting moderator and user boycott, I deleted its apps off my devices and stopped visiting the site altogether. The first couple of days were difficult, not in the overwhelming craving way that quitting smoking was hard, but because muscle memory kept trying to open the apps the moment I found myself with a few seconds to spare. That, too, passed.
Thanks, Reddit, for breaking my unhealthy addiction to your site. I couldn’t have done it without you.