Quitting Twitter For Spoutible. It’s Not Going To Plan.
My utopian aspiration for Spoutible was one in which a swift transition from Twitter to the new, socially responsible platform allowed me to close one door and open another. Having said that, it’s naive to expect that even where the same participants are present that the experience will be equivalent.
It’s Not Just Users, it’s the Culture of the Platforms That Influences the Output.
The culture of social media platforms invariably influences the tone, methods and attention to detail invested into any given post. The bigger the community, the greater the risk for a user to misstep. And if there’s one thing that’s clearly evident about Twitter, between influence peddling, selective application of policy, a proliferation of trolls, bots and porcelain egos, these characteristics mirror the believe anything nature of the conspiracy theorist where the platform architecture is explicitly woven into the morass of deceit.
Example: Twitter is a snake-pit, so users are more cautious in their posts lest they be attacked, ostracised, their words taken out of context or weaponised against them.
Spoutible to date, is not only sleepy, but if my Timeline is any sort of guide, little more than a series of posts expressing gratitude for its existence, tributes to Christopher Bouzy for having the courage to create it, I’ve got so many more followers than I had on Twitter after X years and random signals from individuals hoping to forge new communities of mutual interest.
There’s No Knives-Out Culture at Spoutible.
A key motivation for people to flock to Twitter is to experience a diverse collection of first hand knowledge, an exchange of informed opinion from credible sources, and proximity to events, past and current. That the site is in such appalling disarray generates the need for alternatives such as Spoutible, but it’s far from a panacea.
It’d be absurd to desire a knives-out culture for Spoutible, but at its genesis, it’s easy to correlate this gentle, lacking in focus culture with an experience that is largely underwhelming.
The Expression, You Are Not Losing a Son but Gaining a Daughter, Comes to Mind.
Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are disparate enough to curate discrete aspects of your life, and the appeal of each satisfies a user’s need for engagement within more targeted communities. It’s not uncommon to use all three.
Spoutible presents as a suitable alternative to Twitter; it’s structured similarly, and it is to this cohort that it has made its appeal. To my earlier point however, I haven’t jettisoned Twitter for Spoutible; instead I now have another social media account to engage in.
The Upside and Downside for Spoutible
My dalliances to date indicate for me that Spoutible is sticky enough to persist with. The fact that it’s still a web based experience with no explicit indication as to when an app instance will arrive demands a higher degree of patience from users, though I understand this solution is weeks away. It’s a risky play; a significant part of social media channel engagement is ease of access, and compared to Twitter, Spoutible is a distant second.
Twitter has the users, the insight and though it can be frustrating, the value exchange remains in favour of the user. And that’s putting aside the minimisation of content I’m interested in, the heightened presence of conservative media, views I neither believe or have interest in, and the constant distractions by Humpty Dumpty 2.0 — an individual who personifies the better to say nothing and be thought a fool expression. How the perceivably infallible have fallen.
What Needs to Change For Spoutible For This Farewell Ritual to Be Fulfilled?
- An iOS app. Mandatory.
- A greater migration of users from Twitter. With this comes increased insight and narrative. The exchanges in Twitter threads can be comparable to watching research being undertaken in real time by a collective of people with actual proximity and knowledge.
- Twitter generates an opportunity for people to be held to account. Spoutible, free of the pestilence of Twitter would be far more effective at cutting through in that messaging, assuming the socially responsible vision can be maintained.
- Communities need to form; Spoutible needs to become an environment where rich interaction and connection takes place.
- A cultural shift needs to occur where society doesn’t need a perceived villain at the helm. An appreciation for accountability, an exchange of ideas and responsible conveyance of affairs and events. If what attracts people to a platform is a voyeuristic lust to watch the arsonists at play, and that’s what drives engagement, it may say more about us than it does the opportunists who exploit that foible of humanity.
Can Spoutible Succeed?
Positioned as a substitute for Twitter, it’s hard to see this eventuating. Too reliant on people abandoning existing communities and habits. For those who tend to use Twitter as a news feed of sorts, the transition is less ominous, there’s less to lose.
It’s reasonable to expect that Spoutible will evolve in a manner favourable to its user base and with time it may well become less of an alternative to Twitter and a platform unique in its own right.