FOR IF (when) THE BIRD APP BREAKS FOR GOOD

Of the many, many, many things the guy who bought this forsaken web site failed to understand, near the top of the list is its utility for media outlets.

Yes, including crimson quarry.

What I can only guess he thought is that people went to Twitter... for Twitter. Something very surface level that doesn’t really tell the full story. But if you know anything at all about media you’d know that’s extremely not the case.

Twitter, for us, is a means to an end. We get to easily communicate with our audience in a fun way but it’s absolutely not a major source of traffic, much less so than for larger sports and news outlets out there.

People go to Twitter for that content. So, naturally, the site’s new owner decided to undermine that content. First he set out to undermine the verification system as some form of status symbol rather than a mark of, well, verification.

So now everyone who wants has a checkmark for $8 because it looks cool. Everyone wanted to sit at what they perceived as the cool kids’ table at lunch. Then all the cool kids got up and left because why pay for a free site.

Then he picked a fight with NPR, for some reason. NPR and its affiliates are pretty beloved and a source of good info so he was always gonna lose that battle.

Every single decision that has been made since the purchase has felt poorly thought out, probably because it was. It’s a dying app and today’s news of data scraping limits, another thing I guarantee you he doesn’t understand, is maybe about as close to a last gasp as we’re gonna get.

So... what does that mean for crimson quarry?

We’ll still be around and if things get uglier on the bird app we’ll probably fire up the forums and interact with comments, just not in a message board man way. Do not ask us about an ongoing official visit, we’re busy.

If there emerges a good alternative to the decaying husk of Twitter, we might find a way to get there.

We’ll post here about anything official. Until then, toodles.