tl;dr:
- Throttled and Silenced – Years of deliberate suppression on X.com have left my account with a fraction of its former reach, despite substantial follower numbers. Elon Musk’s motto, “free speech, not reach,” has proven accurate for me.
- Pay-to-Play Social Media – X.com’s Premium+ pricing hike demands $228 per year for limited visibility, effectively forcing creators to pay for engagement while promoting meme-driven, low-effort content.
- Breaking Free from Big Tech – I’m leaving X.com for my self-owned microblog, SangerFeed.org, where I control my content and can’t be throttled. I encourage others to take ownership of their online presence too.
For over 10 years, I have had an uneasy relationship with social media.
Partly, my issue is with the entire practice of publishing my views, which seems like a necessary evil at best. It mixes the laudable motive of improving the world with the vice of vanity.
Then there are my reservations about the medium. Short titles and epigrams are incapable of expressing the depth that the truth, in all its complexity, requires.
Then there are the stupid social games, which I refuse to play. X has made this even worse by micromanaging these games—designing the feed, especially the visibility of posts, around a certain sort of fairly brainless version of the game.
Certain puerile, anonymous accounts started just within the last few years have been the real winners under this new gamified regime. By sharing memes, hot takes, and open-ended questions, such accounts rapidly gained hundreds of thousands of followers. I wonder if they’re run by spooks or by X.com itself. I routinely mute or block them.
And then there’s the throttling.
The same rules deliberately limit the reach of accounts, even accounts that have many followers. I would think that this has been a merely accidental result of ham-handed nomic design—i.e., clumsy selection of rules—except that my engagement went off a cliff after the January 6, 2021 invasion of the Capitol. I thought perhaps this might change after the great savior Elon Musk took over, but I was suppressed harder than ever.
My X.com account, at present, gets a small fraction of the traffic it was getting in later 2019 and 2020. Back then, a typical successful tweet would get dozens of likes and hundreds of retweets, and several with hundreds of retweets every week. I had quite a few tweets with over 1000 retweets. No more. There almost seems to be an upper bound on my reach, regardless of how important the tweet is. My average reach is comparable to many accounts with 5000 followers—a tenth of my follower count. I haven’t had a single viral tweet, that I can recall, in the last couple of years.
Elon has lived up to his mantra: “Freedom of speech, not reach.” He seems blind to the fact that this is, beyond hypocrisy, a betrayal of the very ideals he supposedly champions.
I was willing, grudgingly, to tolerate up this unfair treatment, because I wanted to be able to converse with those of my peeps that still regularly saw my posts.
But then came the straw that broke the camel’s back: X raised the price on the Premium+ account. Mind you, my sucky reach could be achieved only if I paid for Premium+. For months I did not pay for it, and then I was throttled even more—I was lucky ever to break 10 retweets. But now, I would have to pay the richest man in the world $228 per year for the dubious privilege of reaching a tiny, slightly boosted fraction of my followers. This added injury to insult.
Well, I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore. I have quit posting content to X.com. If you’re in the same position, maybe you should do the same. Frankly, I probably should have followed through with my threats against social media that I introduced back in 2019.
I will not delete my X.com account, but I will not be using it—except to point people to my replies posted to my self-owned microblog, a Minifeed install called SangerFeed.org, and less frequently, to my posts on LarrySanger.org (my blog) and BitChute (my preferred video posting platform, where I am an advisor). Don’t be hurt if I don’t respond to you on X.com itself. It’s now my policy not to do so.
If I do respond to you, it will be on SangerFeed, where I can’t be throttled. I hope you will respond to me there as well. You can make an account, and even post there, just as if you were “tweeting at” me on X.com—that is how to do so now. Your top-level posts will be marked as guest posts.
I have also added my latest posts on both SangerFeed and BitChute to the top of the front page of LarrySanger.org (this blog). So now there’s a “one-stop shop” for my web presence. I recommend you do the same.
By the way, if you’re wondering what SangerFeed runs, it is the self-owned Minifeed platform—a free WordPress blog theme. If you want one, make an account on SangerFeed, let me know and I can send you the theme file via the email address you’ll give me when you make the account. Minifeed allows you to take ownership and control of your social media presence. It also allows us to follow each other independently of X.com or other Big Tech platforms. It is a product of the Knowledge Standards Foundation, and it’s quite functional, but we stopped work on it a few years ago. Hopefully we’ll be able to make more progress on it again soon, one way or another. Maybe I will make improvements myself with GPT’s help. I am sure we’ll work more on it if more people want to use it.
I would be happy if Elon Musk responded to this blog post, but he won’t. I doubt his company will even refund the $84 annual subscription I stupidly paid for on December 22, and which I asked to be refunded on December 23. He clearly does not care about alienating people like me. I hope others follow me, and so much the worse for him—I have washed my hands of his personal playground. I will not return unless he effectively reverses the policies that have resulted in me, and not a few of my friends, being systemically throttled in favor of those who play his silly game.
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