Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Twitter Bums

Almost a year ago the Twitter cops kicked me permanently and irrevocably off of Twitter over nothing.

I availed myself of their appeals process three times, was rejected without explanation each time, and the third time they told me that I had used up all my appeals and to shut up and go away.  These pronouncement were accompanied with several Dire Warnings of what would happen if I persisted or attempt to evade the might hand of Twitter Justice.

So here's a thing you need to know about bloggers like me.  

When you're a little guy, an independent blogger with no bylines anywhere and no affiliations with any coastal Liberal networks, the only PR you get is the PR you drum up for yourself.  And, of course, word-of-mouth carried into the world by lovely people.  

Self-promotion.  Or what A-List bloggers used to disparage as "blog whoring".  Unseemly.  Wait your turn kid.  And so forth.  Much of which was motivated by the fact that the A-Listers already had friendly contacts in the legacy media and paying gigs in the legacy media, and/or were already networked together and would drive traffic almost exclusively to one another.  

And traffic means revenue, from fundraisers, advertisers and regular contributors.  .

This led such unpleasantness as Blogroll Amnesty Day, which the late, great Jon Swift explained in unsparing detail on his blog long ago.

I remember how difficult it was to get people to notice my blog when I first started out. "Build it and they will come," apparently only works with magic baseball fields. The only way to get anyone to notice my blog was to get them to link to me and that was not always easy. I linked to other bloggers and clicked on those links hoping they would notice my link in Sitemeter. I sent emails to other bloggers asking them to take a look at my latest piece or to add me to their blogrolls. I instituted my "Liberal Blogrolling Policy" offering to exchange links with anyone who linked to me. As more blogs began to link to me and add me to their blogrolls, a curious thing began to happen. More people came to my blog from those links and from Google. And many of those readers then visited the blogs that I linked to. Though it cost nothing to link to someone, I realized that on the Internet links are capital. Every link has value. And when two bloggers link to each other, they both profit.

The idea that links are the capital of the blogosphere seems so obvious that you would think an economist like Atrios of Eschaton would have realized it long ago. And as he is a progressive who has accumulated quite a bit of link wealth, you might also think he would be in favor of redistributing some of that wealth instead of just letting it trickle down. So when he announced last year that he was declaring February 3 Blogroll Amnesty Day, and other bloggers followed suit, I assumed he meant that he was opening his blogroll up to the masses. I sent him a polite email pointing out that his blog was on my blogroll and I would really appreciate it if he would add my blog to his. I never heard back from him.

When February 3 rolled around, many bloggers discovered to their horror that instead of adding new blogs to his blogroll he was throwing many off, including some bloggers who were his longtime friends. Blogroll Amnesty Day, it turned out, was a very Orwellian concept. Instead of granting amnesty to others he was granting amnesty to himself not to feel bad for hurting others feelings. Though Atrios has stubbornly refused to acknowledge that he made a mistake, some bloggers who initially joined him, backtracked. Markos of the Daily Kos instituted a second blogroll that consisted of random links from diarists. PZ Myers of Pharyngula now has real Blogroll Amnesty Days where he invites anyone who has blogrolled him to join his blogroll. And in the wake of the bloodletting quite a number of smaller blogs, like my friend skippy the bush kangaroo, changed their own blogroll policies and now link more freely to others...

As I am reminded every time I take a turn doing Mike's Blog Roundup over at Crooks & Liars and go looking for the latest word from the smaller Liberal   blogs...the Liberal blogosphere is a mere shadow of its former self.  Defunct blogroll links hugely outnumber live, recent ones.  Most of the bloggers who were around back then are gone now.  Moved on, lost interest, or died. 

And yet traffic is still currency, especially for those very few of us who are still around and still have  no bylines anywhere and no affiliations with any coastal Liberal collectives.  And the cheapest and most reliable means of self-promotion out there for someone like me is definitely Twitter.  Virtually no one shows up at my blog front door based on a link or a like on Facebook, but when Twitter cut me off, my traffic dropped by 60-70% almost overnight.  

I write new stuff or doodle up new graphics almost every day, but spontaneously stopping by someone's blog to check out what they've been up every day to is just not how humans operate.  Jon Swift was right;  "Build it and they will come," apparently only works with magic baseball fields.  It does not work for blogging,  People need to have a link and an enticement placed in their hands where they are.  Often repeatedly.  And if what you're offering is more than a single click away, they won't come.   

In the world as it is, promotion is absolutely necessary.  If you need proof, just head over to The Bulwark note of how they use every column, every podcast and every appearance on any media platform at their disposal to relentlessly promote their own people, their advertisers and their various paid subscription offers.

That's what they've got.

What I've got is Twitter, and the podcast I do every week with my wife. and, as I mentioned, the word-of-mouth put into the world by you lovely people.  So when the Twitter cops suddenly decided to toss me out forever for no good reason, that really stung.  Tangibly.  And so for about a year I have been off that hellsite.  Still writing because that's what writers do (he added tautologically) but for a much smaller readership.

So how did I get sprung from Twitter jail?

I have no idea, but I do know how bureaucracies operate, and I figured that after a year there was a decent chance that the pissy, digital ribbon clerk who decided to kick me out and keep me out might well have either quit or moved on to bigger and better things at Twitter, Inc. because nobody stays in that kind of martinet/traffic cop job for long.  So, to quote Lester Freamon, I guess they just forgot about me.  

Some new person reviewed my new appeal, dropped me a note that I had, in fact, not violated any Twitters rules  And just like that, after returning some of my personal effects...

...they sprung me.

So, since I had never violated their terms of service to start with, the question remains, "What was the real reason I was cast out of Twitter with such aggressive finality in the first place?"

And like so much in life, the answer is, I'll never know for certain.

But I'm pretty sure it has a lot to do with me engaging in the transgressive practice of asking impertinent questions of important people and remembering inconvenient truths in public without the benefit of clout-heavy friends in high places or a blue check or anything.  

Which, if I remember correctly all these years later, was the reason I got into blogging in the first place. 

No Half Measures