Almost twelve years ago, I made a post on here to announce that I had made a Twitter account. It only seems fair to also make a note today that I no longer have a Twitter account. Or rather, it technically still exists, but I've been locked out of it.
Twitter had been pestering me for a while now to add my date of birth to my account. I'm usually not the kind of privacy nut to refuse giving any personal data to anyone, but Twitter under the leadership of Elon Musk? No, thanks. Plus I'd been using the site just fine for over a decade without giving them that, so I didn't see the need. I figured they just wanted it to have an excuse to shove porn down by throat, since that seems to be their latest thing.
At one point they decided to set me a deadline. If I wasn't going to add my birth date by July 8th, I was going to lose access to my account! That day came and went and nothing happened. Figures that it was just a bluff. But then yesterday...
So I guess that's it. I mean, the site had got a lot worse since Elon took over and I've been wanting to move away from it anyway, but I've got to admit I didn't expect it to quit on me first. And despite myself, I'm a little annoyed and upset.
I won't miss Twitter as a whole... the random browsing experience got so much worse once they made the change the verification, as the top replies to any post would just be blue checks saying horrible and/or stupid things. But for some reason most of the SWTOR community (including the official account!) seem to pretty much live on Twitter, and I feel that I'm going to miss out on a lot of things now.
Like that mount sale I posted about the other week? Was only announced on Twitter. Yesterday, a friend told me that the official account had announced a livestream for this Tuesday. If he hadn't told me, I wouldn't know because there certainly hasn't been any sign of that announcement on any of their other socials, including the official forums!
In the past it made sense to focus on announcing things on Twitter because unlike most social media sites it was open to be viewed by anyone, whether they had an account or not, but Elon Musk changed that! I wonder whether people even realise that all their "public" posts are no longer truly public. Like, if you go to the official SWTOR account's page without being logged into Twitter, the newest non-pinned post that you can see is from May 2022. Why do you think only Twitter users are worthy of knowing about what's happening with the game, huh? It's not even such a big platform anymore!
And of course many of my fellow content creators are the same. I wonder how long it'll take for anyone to even notice that I'm gone. Maybe in a month or so, someone will go "huh, I haven't seen Shintar post anything in a while; wonder whatever happened to her".
Anyway, that's that rant out of the way. I'll just have to live with less news about the game and community involvement going forward I guess.
Thank you for pointing out the livestream coming on Tuesday! I wouldn't have caught that otherwise.
ReplyDeleteEA forums are kind of a mess atm. They've set up a new forum site for several games, old and new, including the mobile game Galaxy of Heroes and a couple of previously-separate forums have become read-only as a result. I really hope SWTOR manages to avoid being rolled into that system as well, although not mentioning the stream on their own forums is certainly not good regardless.
I checked my two tiny little accounts and saw that I had my birth date on one. I removed that so we'll see how long it takes for them to shut me out. :) I only had that information in there because years ago I was thinking of trying to get verified.
ReplyDeleteI would not have noticed that mount sale if you hadn't mentioned it. Thanks for that, I got some that I really like.
ReplyDeleteAs for twitter, I have been forced to use it IRL on occasion (don't ask), but I am honestly glad to see fewer and fewer people using it. I never much liked fooling with it. I sure as hell don't engage with it for fun, regardless of how much I might like some of the bloggers that occasionally post there. The early Penny Arcade comic on it is how I have felt pretty much the whole time:
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/04/23/le-twittre
"Yesterday, a friend told me that the official account had announced a livestream for this Tuesday."
ReplyDeleteIs this for real? Are they not going to announce it anywhere else? I regularly visit the forums and reddit and this is the first time i hear about a livestream.
I have to admit I'm somewhat baffled by the complete radio silence as well. My personal annoyance with Twitter aside, I figured maybe they just announced it there first and would post on the forums and other channels today, but so far there's been nothing! They still have time, but if they do say anything now, people will have had less than 24 hours notice...
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DeleteI do very little comment moderation here aside from spam removal, but deleted the above comment for calling the devs names. You can express your annoyance without that please.
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