My first foray into the Twins online community was from a link on ESPN's Page 2, which brought me to a post on the Bat-Girl blog. Bat-Girl was the pseudonym of Twin Cities author Anne Ursu, and it was brilliant. Not only did it introduce a vital bit of humor to my baseball consumption, it also introduced me to the growing space of independent writers, especially sports writers, who were just starting the nascent blogosphere.
I got to know more and more writers, and became familiar with a lot of national writers, and as many of them moved to Twitter, I followed them. As Google Reader disappeared, Twitter became my clearinghouse for news, updated in about as real time as possible. It was easy to stay updated on the headlines of the day, and see a quip about those headlines just as quickly. If you knew where to go, and you were on TweetDeck, Twitter was great.
And then it wasn't. Regardless of your opinion of the current owner of the platform and the controversies surrounding him, Twitter, or really any social media platform, are only as valuable as the user base on those sites, and when Elon Musk bought it, and after his subsequent changes, the number of users started to deteriorate, and the functionality for the price diminished.
Given the staffing cuts, and the grandeur of the scandals surrounding Musk and Twitter, the site is never going to be the same. I still automatically post these posts, as well as those from my other two sites, but I'm not on there any more, just scouring for news or posting my own hot takes. I have dipped my toe literally everywhere else though. Post.news is great for news, but doesn't have a "sports" section yet, and the user base is small. Mastadon is probably my favorite right now because of the automatic refresh, but is difficult to get started, and the users I follow are essentially mirrored from Twitter, and I worry what happens when that goes away. Threads will likely be the choice of corporate feeds, while Blue Sky will be the choice for individuals. (I'm @rhinoandcompass on all 4).
The point, though, is that if I want news, or a specific kind of content, I have to start hunting for it again. I need to start going to my favorite Twins sites again for news and analysis, rather than waiting for it to scroll across my timeline. I need to refresh MLB Trade Rumors awaiting updates, or wait for an alert on my phone after everything is buttoned up 5 hours later. It's like it's 2004 all over again.
Right down to the false hope that eventually, my refreshing would pay off, and I would find out the Twins actually DID something.
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