A year ago today, Twitter changed in a big way. I don’t need to say much more on why, as anyone who has ever used the website has known first hand the effects that has gone down since said changes took place.

In April of 2023, I decided to leave Twitter and only keep my account on the site for the sake of preserving my prior posts, having a spot to upload Switch clips to for use on the site, (I have since found a better, faster, Twitter-less way of doing so) and for contacting any indie/dev/mutual pals who refuse to leave the site or have other means of contacting them. It seems I made the right call, as the site has even gone further down the cliff in the months since, which brings us to today, a day I had in my mind as one I wanted to just muse about and explain to readers my general focus for SFG again, (also noted in the recent status update post) along with a brief note of what my decision for ditching Twitter has done for the site stats.

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Leaving Twitter

So what made me throw my hands up and ditch the site in April, instead of last October, when the changeup happened? Well, I had a lot of things planned, and quite frankly, I didn’t expect or hope that any major changes would be that bad or last as long as they did. Surely the EU would come in and kick that moron off the site if he tried to do anything crazy, and surely the users would revolt and keep the peace in the end, as was the case when Patreon attempted stupid changes several years ago. Much to my dismay, all of those hopes were dashed and the site got real bad earlier this year.

To keep things… mildly vague, a situation took place in a circle I’ve reported on that was rather alarming, and led to me noticing a sharp spike in transphobia aimed at certain people involved. This was right around when the US in general pushed some nasty, hardcore anti trans bills, and when bigots all over were basically using the site as their method to attack the LGBT community. The new verification system was even more alarming, since what I even initially considered taking advantage of to promote a passion project quickly became something that I realized was utterly useless and basically a means of pushing some of the worst, most toxic posts you could think of to the top of everyone’s feed.

And when this transphobic situation happened regarding a certain space I reported on, awful people used this combo to basically be as vile and bigoted as humanly possible, including hurling insults and very nasty remarks towards several friends of mine. Normally when I saw dumb takes or bigoted behavior, manual blocks were more than satisfactory, even in the darkest, most frustrating of times on the site, but here it was just relentless; and I wasn’t even the main target! The few I got were still more toxic people than I was used to dealing with, and other peers just got swamped if so much as the subject got brought up, all while the report button for what was blatant bigotry just failed to work, time and time again.

It got so bad, I’ve known one person who had to flee the entire internet over this due to excessive targeted harassment, and that is not fucking OK in the slightest. Needless to say, manual blocking was no longer working, and I am staunchly against using autoblockers of any kind, so I pretty much started to take breaks from the site whenever anything too stressful or heated came up. Even when I tried to fight and help out, or just quietly browse, seeing how nasty people were now that they felt unshackled to say whatever the hell they wanted was very demoralizing. Even when that situation died down, other similar ones targeting the LGBT community kicked up, and as worse IRL news about trans rights came into view, the more the site’s owner and some of the worst people imaginable would post vile shit, day after day. Even if you long blocked them, the “For You” feed would almost certainly shove them in your face whether you wanted them or not. By February, looking at Twitter just became depressing, but I stuck with it because I felt the need to push my content and stay in touch with peers.

Then the API broke.

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WordPress API Demise and the leave

I already made thoughts on this when it happened and the same thoughts mostly applied; it’s horrible. It was stupid. And it really hurt freelancers and content creators in general from sharing their work on Twitter. I was already struggling to promote my documentary video I spent most of 2022 crunching on, but at least my articles did pretty well. Sure enough, almost the minute this news kicked in, my site view count took a small hit. I would try to manually promote stuff in late March/April, but eventually, I grew frustrated, and the bigotry and negativity and awful algorithms just kept growing and growing. I’d try to join in on hashtags and usual accounts that helped boost my content before, and manually sharing stuff, even the PMD vid, led to almost no traction.

The little bit of Twitter views I was getting post API changes, was pitiful. The video I wasted a year of my life on underperforming didn’t help matters either, but I couldn’t even salvage or promote that to a community on Twitter that would care for that content, because discoverability was broken, and even the search tool was breaking! Joy!

So late April, I said “fuck this” and logged out of Twitter and erased it from my bookmarks. But I still had some friends who didn’t leave, so I would poke at their feeds while out of the site, at least assuming I could do that to stay in touch or see what they were up to even if I wanted no interaction with the site anymore. My mental health improved quite a bit, as did my focus. I only would sometimes log in to check on something but it was easy to avoid the stressors if I just went to my notifications. DMs still worked OK.

Then they didn’t.

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Mandatory Log in, Private Feed, and Moving On

Sometime this summer, because I do not care to look at exact dates now, I couldn’t look at my friends and their feeds anymore logged out. It mandated a log in.

Well, there goes my incentive to go on the site at all. Even direct thread links just were borked, as it would only show a singular post from a Twitter thread, and nothing more. By this point a lot of my peers and friends moved to Cohost, Discord, and that Cryptobro social media that will 100% be a toxic landscape in a year, so I had other means of reaching the folks I was still checking Twitter feeds for.

And then Twitter got even more toxic as more rules were removed and unbound, and reporting said accounts targeting friends and minorites led to more crickets of obvious rule violations not being violated, apparently. So I left for good, but not before locking my account. It was as simple as that. I still have the SFG twitter up and seldom post to it, but I almost never use it now and go weeks without logging in. Especially in the current midst of a horrid series of war crimes taking place on the world stage, I do not want to touch that website with a ten foot pole. So yeah, pretty anticlimatic end to my roundup on leaving Twitter and looking back on why I cut down on it, but really the site just keeps getting worse and worse. I am not at all ashamed to have left it and I am kinda surprised I get the occasional question from a PR rep or friend about why my Twitter is private, so in a way, this article serves as a good reminder on why that is.

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Conclusion

Twitter was instrumental to the buildup and expansion of SFG. I would have not met any of my biggest friends in the space, found the guy who interviewed Shinichiro Tomie to lead me to him, covered so many awesome games, and gotten to do so many cool opportunities if I hadn’t joined a mere month after focusing my site on reviews back in 2014. Even during the worst parts of the site pre-takeover, I still enjoyed my time and was able to at least mute terms and just focus on talking with friends about games we were hyped for or the like if I was too stressed.

But even the events of 2020 that led me to take a big multi-month hiatus for my own mental health come nowhere close to the nightmare that was the current year post takeover, where now the site has a stupid new name that makes my old website name look like a masterpiece in comparison. Yes Pokemon Battle Zone, you are no longer the worst named Internet community out there.

So yeah. The good news is around June or so, I noticed my site views going back up to roughly what it was pre-Twitter API shutdown, and that seemed to be due to better SEO I experimented with, along with sharing my content on Discord and Cohost. It seems like even now, 6 months after leaving Twitter, I don’t need it to promote SFG stuff anymore, and for writing things like this, I think those who want to see it shall be able to, and that’s fine enough for me. I managed to resume catchup on the review queue much faster than I ever could if I was distracted by the world horrors going on all the time, and I’m still on pace to finish it by the end of 2023, so I’m sticking with that goal and I feel this Social Media break is really gonna help the site in the end.

For those wanting to stay in touch, you can click the socials on the side of the site to see where else I’m at, but I really don’t use that much besides Discord and Cohost. And even then, my Discord is private, which really makes Cohost the most public spot you can find me, outside of this very site. I am experimenting with Twitch streams for my own enjoyment, but no review copies will be shown on that account, so I will not do sponsored streams unless something big comes my way to make me change my mind. Just pure retro backlog goodness.

Quite a horrible year that showed me just how fast everything can change for the worse when it comes to brand acquisitions, and honest to god, I’d be pretty fearful if WordPress ended up pulling a Twitter someday. Here’s hoping such a thing never happens, and thank you for reading my rambly reflection on a site that used to be so good, but now is just a toxic waste.