Thank you to everyone who voted in this poll or commented about Twitter engagement.
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Thank you to everyone who voted in this poll or commented about Twitter engagement. It's been really interesting hearing people's thoughts.
(It was also just before the US election that we asked, so things meaningfully changed shortly thereafter.)canongatebooks (@[email protected])
I posted this on Twitter, but it felt like it might also be worth sharing where some of the Twitter diaspora might see it, because I’d welcome feedback from that perspective. We’re having some lively conversations about our engagement with Twitter, because of all the obvious things (the political atmosphere of the place, the lack of moderation, chaotic mismanagement etc etc). We don't want to give up on the things we like about Twitter (being the people), and we don't want to lose a forum to engage with and support our authors. But logging onto Twitter increasingly carries a heavy dread with it, and with the long term viability of Twitter feeling somewhat dubious, it’s not clear how much effort we should be investing there (when time spent elsewhere might be better rewarded). I’d be really interested to hear any thoughts/personal experiences about Twitter: if you left, if you’re still there but trying Mastodon as a replacement, if you can’t see the fuss. Particularly if you’re an author (any author, though Canongate authors – as always! – we’d especially love to hear from you), but also if you work in publishing, in bookselling, or if you’re just a reader who still uses social media for book chat. How useful is Twitter these days? Is it still worth the downside? All comments welcome. Here’s a very reductive poll as well. [ ] Never used Twitter [ ] Left Twitter (felt like it was getting bad) [ ] Still use Twitter with other platforms and like it [ ] Still use Twitter but trying to move elsewhere
Mastodon (bookish.community)
Some notes on the feedback we got and recent activity: I asked a version of the same question across Mastodon, Threads and Twitter.
There was one point of consistency/agreement across the platforms: for Twitter users and people elsewhere who said they used Twitter to some degree, one third said they liked it, versus two thirds who said they used it but were keen to leave.
So for the very slim portion of Mastodon users who said they were also on Twitter, and for the larger slice of Threads users still on Twitter and (most damningly?) for people responding on Twitter itself, the great majority didn't like being on Twitter.
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That probably helps explain why people were primed to see the presidential election results as a kind of final push out the door of Twitter.
Since Elon Musk bought the company (and the accompanying changes to functionality, moderation and everything else) we've seen our Twitter follower growth slow, flatten and then, since the middle of last year, the total slowly diminish.
The election seems to have caused a flurry of people deleting their accounts, and we've lost about 1,100 followers since the election and about 2,500 since our peak.
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That's still 'only' down about 4% in terms of all of our followers, but it's obvious from engagement over the last year+ and particularly this month that for all the people deleting their accounts there are many more who are using Twitter a lot less, or who are leaving entirely but leaving their account sitting there.
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If you've read this deep into this thread, then you must be at least okay with some intense social media introspection, so I'm going to try to be open about what this means for an independent publisher whose largest social media presence was Twitter (even if talking too seriously about this stuff can often feel a little silly): it sucks.
We've lost a way to talk about our books and our company to a community of people we built up/who found us over the course of years. That was – for a while – a very useful tool for us, and could even be a pleasant environment to exist in.
Twitter was always far from perfect. Personally, I joined Twitter in 2008 and first set up a Mastodon account in 2018 instead because I was already finding it basically insufferable, thought it was set up to encourage shitty behaviour and (a niche concern, I'll admit) didn't appreciate them clamping down on art bots which had become one of my favourite Twitter things.
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There are people who have a rosier opinion than I do of what Twitter was pre-Musk acquisition. Speaking as a broad and maybe unfair generalisation, I think that crowd – call them the nostalgics – has been drawn towards Bluesky as the most one-to-one replacement for what they once had and now miss.
(In the past handful of days we've gone from almost no Bluesky followers to 4,000: https://bsky.app/profile/canongate.co.uk )
Call me a dead-hearted cynic, but the (hyper-capitalist) pressures on Bluesky seem to me to be the same pressures that did for Twitter in the end – and I'm not desperate to relive that cycle – but maybe if that's where a lot of our community goes then we'll end up being active there and enjoying it while it lasts.
