4 ms·

I think there is more to it than that now. I think how you market on Twitter is totally unique from the way you do it anywhere else. Success on that medium, dep

I think there is more to it than that now. I think how you market on Twitter is totally unique from the way you do it anywhere else. Success on that medium, depending on the thing you are marketing, can become predicated on a number of things. For example, I've witnessed game developers who were making truly beautiful things, who got stonewalled because they wouldn't drink the current koolaid. That flavor of koolaid at the moment happens to be the results of the election and defining where you stand. A few years back, I saw great indie companies getting blackballed because of anything less than purist views on subjects like gamergate. I do think you can penetrate and market well on Twitter, but it comes with quite a few ifs. Maybe this comes, for the first time, with having a marketing platform with instant human feedback (note: I did not say customer).

csydas 10y ago
I won't deny that it can be a very divisive platform, and unfortunately people are not always very good at divorcing the product from the artist for certain subjects. It can be a weird disconnect to do so, and I'm not a stranger to it as a fan of Burzum. (Great music, but Varg Vikernes definitely has some distasteful and wrong positions imho). Not everyone is comfortable with that, and I understand that aspect; sometimes our conscious doesn't allow us to cross wires like that and it doesn't sit well to have this sort of inconsistency between "I like the product, but I don't want to support the creator because of X". Quite frankly, I'm not sure I see the problem with people adhering to their beliefs and standards, and a call for boycott is one of the methods for expressing distaste. It's one tool of many. I may not agree with what people decide to boycott or for the reason they do, but it's their choice to do so. Being on Twitter puts you in a public forum and as such, you are vulnerable and accessible by such protests, and this is how it should be. Counter groups are perfectly allowed to form, and the artist is not stopped from being an arist. (Varg may be an exception here, but I do not doubt that quite a few people really disagreed with his political and social viewpoints, and yet he kept doing what he did regardless, and they kept listening. Those that were too put off just stopped) Twitter allows for the sort of witch-hunts for any such thing a group desires to be done instantly, with very little cost to the person posting, and with very few reprecussions. We see it from the mass boycotts to unmitigated and open racism on the platform. It's part of the rush and the good feeling of social media, the feel of being part of a crowd or a part of something bigger. I get that it's intimidating, but that's part of being connected to an entire world and audience - sometimes the audience disapproves, and they disapprove harshly.
erikpukinskis 10y ago
> I saw great indie companies getting blackballed because of anything less than purist views on subjects like gamergate. I think that's ok. We used to have a notion that a product is just a product, and we should all just pretend the people making it are apolitical and enjoy the product on its own merits. But that leads to a world where resources pool up in random places. This guy has a billion dollars because he makes a beverage a lot of people like? Why? Are beverage skills the barometer for deciding how resources are allocated? I should note that this system works OK when there is an additional pool of public resources that people can rely on. If private revenue is "spending cash" but the state still controls its natural resources, and cities have a commons, and extended families take care of each other, things are kind of OK. But that's over now, we are privatizing 100% of resources, so now revenue really has to be a perfect proxy for how we think resources should be allocated, from a social/moral perspective. So now we are moving to a world where that guy needs to not only make a nice beverage but he needs to show that he shares our values, because we're not just buying a soda, we are deciding who will starve, which ecosystems will be destroyed, and what kinds of people will be unemployed. If someone needs an indie game maker to disavow feminist commentators in order to feel comfortable buying a game... well, I disagree with the moral stance, but I support very much that person's right to spend their money and influence that way. We have no other choice in a capitalist system.

csydas 10y ago

I won't deny that it can be a very divisive platform, and unfortunately people are not always very good at divorcing the product from the artist for certain subjects. It can be a weird disconnect to do so, and I'm not a stranger to it as a fan of Burzum. (Great music, but Varg Vikernes definitely has some distasteful and wrong positions imho). Not everyone is comfortable with that, and I understand that aspect; sometimes our conscious doesn't allow us to cross wires like that and it doesn't sit well to have this sort of inconsistency between "I like the product, but I don't want to support the creator because of X". Quite frankly, I'm not sure I see the problem with people adhering to their beliefs and standards, and a call for boycott is one of the methods for expressing distaste. It's one tool of many. I may not agree with what people decide to boycott or for the reason they do, but it's their choice to do so. Being on Twitter puts you in a public forum and as such, you are vulnerable and accessible by such protests, and this is how it should be. Counter groups are perfectly allowed to form, and the artist is not stopped from being an arist. (Varg may be an exception here, but I do not doubt that quite a few people really disagreed with his political and social viewpoints, and yet he kept doing what he did regardless, and they kept listening. Those that were too put off just stopped) Twitter allows for the sort of witch-hunts for any such thing a group desires to be done instantly, with very little cost to the person posting, and with very few reprecussions. We see it from the mass boycotts to unmitigated and open racism on the platform. It's part of the rush and the good feeling of social media, the feel of being part of a crowd or a part of something bigger. I get that it's intimidating, but that's part of being connected to an entire world and audience - sometimes the audience disapproves, and they disapprove harshly.

erikpukinskis 10y ago

> I saw great indie companies getting blackballed because of anything less than purist views on subjects like gamergate. I think that's ok. We used to have a notion that a product is just a product, and we should all just pretend the people making it are apolitical and enjoy the product on its own merits. But that leads to a world where resources pool up in random places. This guy has a billion dollars because he makes a beverage a lot of people like? Why? Are beverage skills the barometer for deciding how resources are allocated? I should note that this system works OK when there is an additional pool of public resources that people can rely on. If private revenue is "spending cash" but the state still controls its natural resources, and cities have a commons, and extended families take care of each other, things are kind of OK. But that's over now, we are privatizing 100% of resources, so now revenue really has to be a perfect proxy for how we think resources should be allocated, from a social/moral perspective. So now we are moving to a world where that guy needs to not only make a nice beverage but he needs to show that he shares our values, because we're not just buying a soda, we are deciding who will starve, which ecosystems will be destroyed, and what kinds of people will be unemployed. If someone needs an indie game maker to disavow feminist commentators in order to feel comfortable buying a game... well, I disagree with the moral stance, but I support very much that person's right to spend their money and influence that way. We have no other choice in a capitalist system.