(the following is kind of maybe a very presumptuous opinion, and I am really not trying to insult anyone. It is probably apparent to many of this blogs readers that twitter sucks right now)

I'm sure that if you're reading this, you probably have a twitter account. That's where I am 90% of the time. It's my favorite social media site! I've been able to connect with so many people in such different ways, sometimes loyally just watching someone's life story, and sometimes being an active participant. I love to just shitpost and joke, I often post a lot of stream of consciousness through my twitter. It's a holiday here in America, the 4th of July. I've taken an extra day off at work even! So after doing some errands, I was ready to start enjoying what twitter had to offer. I was presented with this:

Twitter Is Simply Not Going To Last

This may be information that you're already aware of, but Twitter has been on a downward spiral ever since the sale of the company to one Elon Musk on Oct 27, 2022. One of the primary reasons I decided to start posting here was on my desperate search to find a place to post that isn't Twitter. Note doesn't work like Twitter, but it is a hell of a lot better in my opinion than our American counterpart, Substack. There's true discoverability here with hashtags, and the vibe is incredibly wholesome. I don't know if there's some degenerate corner of note, and i'm wholly uninterested in finding out. Thank you note! But starting at about noon 07/01/2023 CST, that incredibly stupid billionaire has seemingly broken Twitter. Users not subscribed to Twitter Blue will only be allowed to see 600 tweets. Yesterday, he restricted public access to Twitter, so that any external link to the site will require you to have a twitter account. 

Apparently, the actual issue is that he has changed a setting internally that is causing the website to ddos itself. Now Twitter has essentially become impossible to use. There is no real telling if it will ever be fully fixed, as his terrible leadership of the company has lead to the firing of essentially anyone who knew anything about how to maintain Twitter. This is a holiday weekend in America, so usage of the platform is probably going to be at a peak clip, especially when everyone wants to upload videos of fireworks. It could also have something to do with how Twitter hasn't paid its bills. Either way, now your tweets are potentially only being seen by a tiny fraction of their normal audience, and at any point the guy in charge can decided arbitrarily that they can be seen by even less.

Twitter is not going to get better. For brands and advertisers, many of the professional functions Twitter asks you to pay for are not worth what you are paying for them. Advertisers in America are abandoning the site in mass droves. It's only going to get worse and worse, with more and more restrictions, until it's gone. If Twitter goes down, there is essentially no staff that will be putting the website back up, because nobody will know how. If the mahjong industry relies heavily on twitter as a primary tool of communication between its customers and businesses, it's time to start thinking of other venues to be ready to pivot to to centralize communication.

I'm sorry if this is patronizing or rude, i'm really not trying to be. It's a problem for anyone that has come to rely on twitter to sell something. There's a lot of American political things that surround it, but Elon Musk is either

a) too stupid to fix the thing he bought on accident or

b) intentionally destroying a social media site where the power user base generally doesn't like him.

the american 20s will probably be remembered as a decade where the arrogance of the billionaire class started becoming a real problem for everyone else in the country. No further comment. But there have been a series of terrible decisions that has led to most power users of the website to conclude that it's days are numbered, and there will be a time in the short to medium term future that the website will just stop working.

Twitter has laid off 80% of its staff. Imagine your current job, and whether or not you think it could continue to function if 80% of the employees were gone. I imagine most of you don't work at a website that is one of the most internationally used websites in the world. Twitter also has violated privacy and consent decrees, which means your data isn't private, and that the company can be fined millions of dollars, something the company really doesn't have as it's now only worth a third of what was paid for it. They're skipping on rent in most of their satellite offices, and are even starting to get evicted for it. The EU could even consider making Twitter inaccessible in that region as Twitter has refused to comply with rules regarding customer protection and privacy, though I imagine that the unpopularity of that decision will keep it from happening.

I have tried to ask around about whether this is common information worldwide, and I realize that this isn't really something that's widely known outside of english speaking countries. It's kind of an "American problem" But given how many mahjong businesses and personalities use twitter to communicate to their supporters, I'm worried that a sudden extended outage of Twitter could have a very lasting negative effect on the forward momentum the mahjong community is currently enjoying. 

Official brands pay people to manage things like that, so I'm not really concerned with them. There are plenty of community members and small businesses who may not have the benefit of someone to manage that, so they may find themselves in trouble if they cannot communicate things to their clientele. I'm also not a professional, so this is just one outsider's opinion. I am aware that it might be based on not having all the facts.

Also be aware I'm not trying to discourage anyone from continuing to post on Twitter. I'll be posting there just as much before as now, this is more a "lets find somewhere new to go and be ready to leave" sort of post. I am just selfishly concerned that all of the cool people I have befriended in the past few months on that website will be impossible to find if the site implodes, so I just want to make everyone aware. So where could people go?

So Where Else Can Everyone Go?

Well I'd be remiss if I didn't mention note. After all, we're all here aren't we? It's also a decent platform for discoverability with the hash tags. Brands seem to have a rougher time here, as this isn't really an "advertise to us" kind of place. Note is a treat! I imagine Ameba and other more japan-centric blogging platforms could also be a pivot. 

Many people are already set up on Instagram and Tiktok. I don't really know too much about how to build a following on there but I imagine those are both platforms that everyone should at least have an idea of how to use.

Discord is what is widely used by the American mahjong community as a captured audience platform. I'm part of quite a few mahjong discords, and this is the way I interact with anyone in the US mahjong community really. This isn't really an optimal solution, as discord requires a lot of specific skills and attention to properly use commercially, and discords have a tendency to silo people away from each other. You can't really find discords through discord itself easily, so it's not really great for overall community building, but people focused on a specific brand or club or organization or team or player might find use in it.

Youtube discovery is really bad, but I imagine most of the personalities in the mahjong world like pro players and vtubers will not really see a dip in their viewership, just maybe a dip in their growth as the primary onramp for their Youtube channels might just decide to go down permanently any moment.

The Race To Replace Twitter

There are some platforms on the horizon that many are looking to to replace Twitter with. Things have gotten so terrible here, that there's now market forces strongly behind making a "Twitter competitor", because all you have to do is offer "Twitter before Elon" and you win.

The first one, already in private beta, is Bluesky. Bluesky is actually a creation of the original inventor of Twitter, Jack Dorsey. It is being developed as a decentralized protocol, and will be a platform that doesn't seem too concerned with self regulation. It will likely be the platform that replicates the more 'free speech' aspects of twitter in terms of content moderation if it ever fully lifts off. 

The next one is in development at Meta, called Threads. It started development at the start of this year, so it is a project specifically being created as a "twitter killer".  Recent public knowledge of this platform inspired what might actually be a real UFC cage fight publicity stunt between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. (man, what reality are we living in really) This platform will integrate with Instagram, and will likely feel like Twitter with Instagram Terms of Service with regard to the sort of content that can be posted there if it ever fully lifts off.

Twitter itself might find itself a way back from the brink if someone decides to buy it from Elon Musk. The website is in such a complete freefall that there is a potential for that, but even a sale might not keep the site online, and that fact might make waiting for a replacement a better idea than just hoping that Twitter will somehow go back to normal. 

I really wish that Twitter hadn't gone to shit. I really really like twitter. But I've seen the writing on the wall for a while, and it seems like many people are realizing for the first time that twitter is on its last legs. I'm a posting maniac, so I have my own personal feelings about losing something I've curated for so long, but eventually the next step has to be taken. At 36, essentially having grown up right next to the publicly available internet, I've hopped between America Online Chatrooms and IRC servers. My wife sort of fell in love with me as a poster first while we were in our early 20s on Livejournal, although we would not actually start dating for another decade or so. From there, it was Myspace and private message boards. Don't post until you have 1000 posts. Konami will sue. Then, Facebook opened up and I became a power user of that website, jumping to Twitter in 2012. There's always gonna be a next jump. I hope that whenever it's time to take it, I can find you all again. I apologize if this article was offensive to anyone, except for elon musk fans.