From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:
I’ve been dreading this post, but not for the reason that you think. Somewhere, probably back in November, I had gotten the bright idea that I would do this post and find a social media site to replace Twitter for my promotion and news needs.
(As a former journalist, I found Twitter very useful. I followed journalists in real time, as well as old journalist friends, who would post nuggets, and I knew how to parse those nuggets. The unfiltered nuggets (in tiny bursts) is what I miss about Twitter, not the promotion, not the “social” aspect, not the “community” which I never found very welcoming in the first place. Anyway.)
In other words, I had put a lot of pressure on this post. I was sure that with a week or so worth of research, I’d have a new social media home.
I didn’t expect two things. The first is that nothing has really shaken out as the Twitter replacement. (And Musk hasn’t quit nor has he finished eviscerating the site, even after he promised he’d step down if people told him to…and people told him to.) The second thing is…I’m not sure I want a Twitter replacement. Yes, I miss the news (see above), but I don’t miss the hordes of judgement that would come with any kind of infraction or perceived infraction.
No one ever checked to see if the infraction actually did happen, as was the case with me getting banned by a lot of sf people because they believed that I had never done anything to help women in the field. Never bought stories from women when I was editing The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (an easy thing to disprove) and never wrote about women’s issues anywhere (also easy to disprove). And yeah, that was the first attack that really bothered me, mostly because I ended up blocking a whole bunch of people whose work I like and whose politics I generally agree with.
It bothered me for days, before I put on my sf convention armor and remembered that social media is like a large party, and I needed my game face on at all times.
I’m not fond of my game face. It goes against my rather blunt grain.
So I’m not going to use this post to find the next Twitter or the place where all the literary folk have gathered. I’m probably going to need to find a few places to land, but that’s separate research unrelated to this piece. In this piece, I’ll look at the changes in the social media landscape and what that means for the future.
Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Here’s a link to Kris Rusch’s books. If you like the thoughts Kris shares, you can show your appreciation by checking out her books.