I took a mini-break -- not even thinking about it particularly, just more by force -- when my mom had her surgery, and it did kind of change the temperature a little. I like Twitter but it is kind of a junk food -- hope you feel real nourishment elsewhere & looking forward to reading you here.
I pretty regularly do this myself, and have been considering another break. I find that whether I have twitter or not does very little to drive traffic to my newsletter, which is my primary means of writerly income outside of workshops, speaking engagements, etc. And I can also see, from the metric of likes, retweets, etc. that the stuff I share that I MOST care about is cared less about by people who follow me ... which makes me wonder why they follow at all. It's complicated and largely useless, isn't it?
It's so strange. I think too many writers just blindly follow other writers, in the hopes of getting reciprocal promotion. I have 6600 followers, but I think the brunt of them ignore me. In 2020 when I lost my job, I started doing promotion for a well-known crime writer and I think a lot of people muted me because of it, and that's fair. I'm glad to have a few people who interact with me there, and I hope they'll follow me here.
That's my approach too. One has to remember these apps aren't out there to help US succeed, but to help the corporations for which we are the product succeed ... and that is easy to forget.
I took a mini-break -- not even thinking about it particularly, just more by force -- when my mom had her surgery, and it did kind of change the temperature a little. I like Twitter but it is kind of a junk food -- hope you feel real nourishment elsewhere & looking forward to reading you here.
Wishing your mom the best. As for Twitter, most of the people I talk to there I can talk to elsewhere.
I pretty regularly do this myself, and have been considering another break. I find that whether I have twitter or not does very little to drive traffic to my newsletter, which is my primary means of writerly income outside of workshops, speaking engagements, etc. And I can also see, from the metric of likes, retweets, etc. that the stuff I share that I MOST care about is cared less about by people who follow me ... which makes me wonder why they follow at all. It's complicated and largely useless, isn't it?
It's so strange. I think too many writers just blindly follow other writers, in the hopes of getting reciprocal promotion. I have 6600 followers, but I think the brunt of them ignore me. In 2020 when I lost my job, I started doing promotion for a well-known crime writer and I think a lot of people muted me because of it, and that's fair. I'm glad to have a few people who interact with me there, and I hope they'll follow me here.
That's my approach too. One has to remember these apps aren't out there to help US succeed, but to help the corporations for which we are the product succeed ... and that is easy to forget.