The Worst Thing About Twitter

Is all the Blah Blah Blah about Twitter.

I’ve been posting on Twitter for over 10 years, have a modest 37,400 followers and once had a blue check, now I console myself by gazing longingly upon the above box of cereal.

It’s fine. “Et Tu Twitter?” has become my second least favorite nostalgic query, right after “Remember when America’s Nut Jobs seemed Benign?” The Elon-era elegies and lamentations have exceeded my personal character limit. I get it, Elon Musk has taken a very annoying web site and added a layer of different annoyances, burning about $20 billion of his own money in the process. So why not experience some Schadenfreude directed at Musk as opposed to being overcome by the SchadenblauesHäkchen created by Musk? Ok, your check mark is gone, now Taye Diggs will never know you’re worthy of friendship. But you move on.

A little while ago I was offered a spot on a Mastodon server, but I was hounded off after committing the infraction of linking to a NY Times article on the issue of youth transition. Here’s the closest-to-interesting version of that boring ordeal. This particular Mastodon “instance”(?) was having none of my linking to the NY Times, especially to an article that wound up as a centerpiece of a protest that was ultimately rebuked by Times management and many of the best writers within the Times. Here’s a not-too-horribly boring article about that controversy, which if you’re not read-in on I can’t emphasize enough how acceptable it is to ignore.

All of this is to say, Mastodon has its flaws and Twitter has its flaws. And, as I read in

Dan Diamond's newsletter

, leaving Twitter also has its flaws. But you know what? I’m on Substack RIGHT NOW! And Substack has just introduced “Notes”. Why not investigate ITS flaws?

NOTESEY PARTY!

Substack is branding their version of Twitter by never mentioning Twitter, they instead describe Notes as:

Notes is a new space on Substack where writers can publish short-form posts and share ideas with each other and their readers. Through Notes, writers and readers can recommend posts, links, images, and quotes, leave comments, and more.

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Substack has also created helpful guides specific to my readers with such language as:

Head to substack.com/notes or find the “Notes” tab in the Substack app. As a subscriber to Pesca Profundities , you’ll automatically see my notes. Feel free to like, reply, or share them around!

Substack is advising me to say something like:

You can also share notes of your own. I hope this becomes a space where every reader of Pesca Profundities can share thoughts, ideas, and interesting quotes from the things we're reading on Substack and beyond.

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And then they advise me to use a button, which you may have seen earlier, to make it easy for users to go to notes. The button says:

So far, so good. Ted Gioia, who not only has an excellent starting last name in Wordle but writes the excellent

The Honest Broker

newsletter has a very inspirational Note about the nature of Notes, and how we, as the Notes community, have the opportunity to define the Notes experience as approaching the better angels of our Notesey nature.

Ted is taking a twitterregnum, which I hope works out for Ted. In the meantime, the Notes experiment seems to be going well for him, but Ted does have thousands of subscribers who bestow hundreds of likes on his every post, and deservedly so. But by way of contrast, my recent insistence on retelling a Columbia Journalism Review story *but with better links* earned me an average of 8 likes per effort. I’m still trying to dig out. The question for me is: “Can Notes work?”, meaning can Notes provide me with some degree of useful reader feedback?

Twitter Versus this New Thing

So I staged an experiment. I would post similar content on Twitter and on Notes and see what reaction I got. Here was my tweet on an important issue of the day

And this was the similar tweet -WAIT SORRY- “Note” I posted on Notes:

As you can see three users (“Notes-ees”) noted my Note. Not Nothing. But The Twitter stats indicated I garnered 13,600 views which led to a very delightful series of back-and-forths between the 14 commenters and myself.

This silly, random, out of the news-cycle tweet that inspired a micro-discussion is my ideal use case for twitter. With only 37,300 followers (and falling since I began this very post), I don’t expect to steer the cultural conversation or blow up the discourse. Which is fine. Twitter has the odd quality of becoming unusable if you achieve great success. This means that if you ever have a tweet go viral, which has happened to me a couple of times, there’s so much reaction from so many directions, that that you can’t possibly engage. On Twitter, widespread notice is simultaneously the promise and the pitfall.

Still, it’s nice to get a bit of a reaction, which brings me to my problem with Notes. I don’t see how Notes is going to get to a threshold of usefulness for most users outside of Substack stars who already have tens of thousands of followers. How does the middle class Note-see eke out attention?

The Best I Can Figure

I guess you just have to plug away. You put time and attention into Notes to make Notes work for you. This seems less fun than it should be, but maybe slightly more fun than having a flaccid social media presence unable to stoke some level of conversation. You tag other Notes-ees. To keep yourself engaged you might try to get the word “Notes-ees” as the accepted term for the users of this new social media service, despite, or maybe on some level because of, the fact that it is a near homophone of another, more charged term. You author longish blog posts documenting your A/B testing of the form. That’s right, you endorse Notesey experimentation. You stop yourself from thinking “that would make a clever tweet” and start thinking “that cleverish insight was actually kind of Notesy.” You eventually land on a consistent spelling of Notesee that offers plausible deniability when the relevant human rights groups object. Finally you post and post and post, aka you note and note and note. You build up a following, wait ten years, decry what Notes has become, wonder how the Notesees have somehow been overrun by extremists, and pine for the discarded husk of Twitter. Does anyone go there anymore? Last I heard it was a meme graveyard, overtaken by bots and the many husks of Jay Rosen parody accounts. You ultimately conclude the entire time-consuming, attention-draining ordeal not in fire, nor in ice, but in an understated yet kind of needy button.