Vote With Your Tweet

Twitter is backsliding into irrelevance. It has been a whirlwind three weeks of bad managerial decisions over there, including:

• October 28, 2022: El*n M*sk finishes a (forced?) hostile-takeover acquisition of Twitter.
• November 3, 2022: Twitter lays off ~3,700 of 7,500 employees, including folks on the Human Rights team (Source), the Trust and Safety team, the Accessibility team, and more.
• November 12, 2022: Laying off 5,000 contractors (Source)
• Unilaterally banning remote work and destroying any previously established work-life balance norms.
• Shipping and pausing an $8 blue check program that began a series of very embarrassing high-profile Impersonator “Verified” accounts (including a lot of fake-brands, which I’m sure advertisers loved).
• November 14, 2022: Firing an employee for disagreeing with him on Twitter. (Source)
• November 17, 2022: M*sk’s “hardcore ultimatum” fired approximately 1000 more (Source)
• November 19, 2022: Reinstatement of D*nald Tr*mp’s twitter account (Source), which he had promised to do in May of this year (Source).

That last one was the last straw for many folks. In time we should probably analyze why this was the last straw and not some of the other previously very terrible things, but in the mean time (and more productively) we can use that momentum to organize!

On the same night as the controversial reinstatement, I shipped a microsite for folks to organize and take action in response:

votewithyourtweet.com

In the first two days of the campaign, 184 folks have participated in the hash tag—wow!

If you want to participate as well, please do! Head on over and take the pledge.

The site has received 12,173 pageviews so far from 4,865 visitors (using a comically cumulative total of 32 MB of hosting bandwidth 👀).

• Launch post on Mastodon
• My pledge on Twitter

My future on Twitter

I’ve taken a number of steps to reduce my Twitter footprint, both professionally and personally.

1. I removed the Twitter bio link from zachleat.com.
2. I removed the Twitter bio link from 11ty.dev.
3. I’m hosting archives for both my tweets and the Eleventy tweets. (you can do this too using tweetback—which I have short-term plans to blog about as well)
4. I put my personal account in protected mode to reduce Twitter’s ability to monetize pageviews from my content. (Inspired by Kevin Beaumont)
5. I put up “This account is now dormant” warning tweets on the @eleven_ty and @webc_omponents accounts.

I think these steps are sufficient for now. I don’t have a plan to bulk delete any tweets.

I have been shifting all of my previous Twitter-energy into Mastodon instead and it’s been great. You can find me on zachleat.com/@zachleat and fosstodon.org/@eleventy.

If Twitter takes substantiative and measurable steps to improve, I may scale back some of these—but given current trends this seems unlikely.