Last week I wrote about alternatives to Twitter, sparked by the rapid changes to the platform under its new billionaire owner. Focusing on our own professional community—the meeting (and hospitality) industry—I’d like to make a modest proposal for a social media platform that might meet our needs better. In other words: an #eventprofs alternative to Twitter. (And LinkedIn and Meta, too.)
Mastodon
Mastodon turns out to be an excellent social media platform that can connect you with your tribe while still giving you full access to posts and conversations over the entire network.
“[Mastodon’s] free and open-source software enables anyone to run a social media platform entirely on their own infrastructure, entirely under their own control, while connecting to a global decentralized social network.” —from a Mastodon blog post
No one owns Mastodon, it runs on free, open-source software. There are no ads. The platform has currently about 8 million members, with more arriving daily.
Anyone can set up a Mastodon server (aka instance) that focuses on a specific community of any kind. (For example, as I write this, journalists are flocking to Mastodon after Musk banned some, apparently for writing critically about him. Already, people have set up a number of instances for journalists.)
Mastodon works like Twitter but with longer posts (up to 500 characters) and important design differences that discourage those who are trying to build their followers and influence by any means possible.
Each Mastodon server has its own community, rules, admins, and moderation. Mastodon’s structure and moderation tools permit a series of efficient and immediate actions against “bad” accounts or instances, where “bad” is defined by the instance administrators and community.
Running a Mastodon instance requires some work and a fairly modest amount of money. The cost rises with the number of users, so you can start small and see how popular your instance becomes. A server with five thousand users currently costs ~$150/month for hosting and bandwidth. Many Mastodon servers are crowdfunded, though server admins are free to come up with other ways to cover costs. Some organizations set up their own instances for their employees and associated community.
The last bullet point leads me to my modest proposal. What if an industry leader like Freeman, RX, Cvent, PCMA, or MPI, to name a few, set up a Mastodon server for the event and hospitality industry?
Mastodon: An #eventprofs alternative to Twitter?
“Mastodon is my favorite alternative to Twitter, and I’m spending more and more time on it. It feels like the early days of Twitter: a fresh, relatively uncrowded, environment where I’m continually meeting new interesting folks. I’ve had many more personal interactions on Mastodon than any of the other alternatives I’ve tried. If the future of Twitter worries you, I think Mastodon is the place to go.” —Adrian Segar, Alternatives to Twitter
Up to now, the event and hospitality community has no single logical place to exist online. Communities are fragmented over Twitter, LinkedIn, Meta, and thousands of niche platforms and spaces. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have our own instance (or a few perhaps) where industry members could meet, connect, post, and converse?
The beauty of implementing such a community on Mastodon is the platform’s flexibility. Mastodon doesn’t lock you into one instance once you’ve joined it. For example, in the future people might decide to have separate servers for events and hospitality folks. Users are free to move their accounts, with all their posts and followers, to a new instance. Or even join both instances if they want.
That’s my case for creating an #eventprofs alternative to Twitter. I think that Mastodon offers just the right balance of a place for our tribe together with natural connections to a much larger Fediverse of communities. I hope this short post stimulates people and organizations to build a better place than Twitter, LinkedIn, and Meta for the #eventprofs community to meet, convene, and converse online.
I joined Twitter in 2009 and have had ~8,600 followers for the last few years. Twitter has already transformed once, becoming more about breaking news than engagement as I describe in my post: Why 2017 was a tipping point for Twitter. ~150 of my followers have left the platform since Musk’s purchase five weeks ago.
Click the image for my post: “Why 2017 was a tipping point for Twitter”
Time will tell whether the exodus will become a rout, which could happen if Twitter becomes too toxic or unreliable.
In this post, I’ll share my findings and thoughts. This is not an exhaustive review (which would at this point need to be book-length). And it’s biased toward platforms I like. Regardless, I hope this summary will be a useful introduction. I’ve included references to helpful resources for you to learn more.
Before we dive into detail about individual platforms, it’s important to understand a few important structural factors that impact user experience and the long-term evolution of these services.
Ownership, openness, and profit
Most social media companies are for-profit corporations, whether publicly or privately owned. Twitter was a public company until Musk bought it. Meta (formerly Facebook) is a public corporation but Mark Zuckerberg controls over half the corporate votes. An anonymous individual, describing himself as an “American patriot” owns Counter Social. Post News, launched a few weeks ago, is funded by venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Scott Galloway, and others. Several large venture capital companies own Discord. Hive Social is owned by its founder, Raluca Pop, and an angel investor.
Of the above platforms, Counter Social is (probably) the only one that owners who’d like to make money don’t control. Meta’s and Twitter’s main income source is advertising, though both services also make money selling the data they collect to third parties. Since going public in 2013, Twitter has only occasionally turned a profit, and one has to wonder if the recent significant pause in advertising by its major customers bodes well for its financial future.
Why should you care? Ernie Smith explains why ownership and openness matter when choosing a social network alternative to Twitter.
Of course, the distinctive thing about all of these networks is that each ultimately is centralized, rather than being built on an open protocol. And that means that they are built to generate value for their founders. They are built for onboarding, not for long-term growth, which means that they lead with cool features, not with promises of sustainability.
And that’s where commercial networks often falter. The financial incentive has created problems over time that have helped to complicate the shape of social media. The immense value of any given social network has ultimately been in data, rather than by offering services to the creator. And that has meant leaning hard on data-mining or advertising-driven business models—and companies that don’t do that ultimately find themselves out of the conversation entirely. —Ernie Smith, Don’t Fall Into The Well
This brings us to Mastodon, which is different.
Mastodon is not owned by anyone; it’s free, open-source software written by Eugen Rochko and released in 2016. I’ll share more about Mastodon below.
As Ernie puts it:
[Mastodon] has a great lead feature that none of its competitors have yet replicated—its adherence to the open web. Unfortunately, alternative networks can throw marketing money at all sorts of other features trying to convince you that those features matter more. But the only feature that truly matters at this moment, even more than how “hip” a network is, is if it talks to every other network. If it’s open, even better.
Whether Mastodon survives and thrives remains to be seen. But its open network plus community ownership is a strong plus in my book.
Size
Size isn’t everything, but the network effect has its advantages. Ideally, we want our social media platforms to include our tribes. All other things being equal, a larger network is more likely to have folks we want to communicate with on it. Here are current estimates of various platforms’ active users. Take these numbers as a guide rather than a selection criterion, because a smaller niche network may fit you better. (For example, Discord’s members are mostly gamers.)
Network
Active users
Twitter
~240M
Discord
~140M
Counter Social
~160K
Mastodon
~8M
Hive Social
~2M
Post News
~140K
User experience
All social media platforms have their own web interfaces and apps that mediate their users’ experience. Platforms continually upgrade user interfaces, functionality, and features, generally (but not always) for the better. Most platforms aim to be as easy to use as possible.
However, there are four specific factors that affect a social media platform’s experience:
the prevalence of advertising;
content moderation policies and effectiveness;
how platform feeds display and prioritize posts; and
the platform’s search capabilities.
Advertising
Twitter (and Meta and Instagram) depend primarily on advertising. The other platforms mentioned in this post are blessedly free from ads.
Content moderation
Content moderation policies and their effectiveness on these platforms are huge and controversial topics. With Musk’s purchase of Twitter, reports indicate that content moderation has been gutted, with the firing of many Twitter employees and outsourced contractors. Musk has said that such work can be automated, but there’s widespread skepticism that this is possible. Meanwhile, the EU has warned Musk that Twitter faces a ban unless he abides by its strict rules on content moderation.
All social media platforms face this problem, and there are no easy answers. As we’ve seen with Twitter and Meta, what is acceptable to post is a moving target, one that’s intertwined with changing political, social, and cultural norms. As platforms like Mastodon, Counter Social, and Hive Social grow rapidly, they will also have to evolve and scale how they perform content moderation if they are going to meet their founders’ goals as a safe-enough space for conversation.
What you see on the platform
How much control a user has over what they see on the platform is an important aspect of the user experience. You have probably had the experience of seeing content (and ads) on Meta that you have no interest in, nor any simple way of banishing from your feed. Conversely, I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a post in my Meta feed but couldn’t find it later, or had to hunt for posts I’m interested in.
Twitter’s feed also has similar problems, though there are workarounds. The other platforms I’ve mentioned can provide chronological unfiltered feeds, so you don’t have to worry about missing stuff. And each platform has its own way of allowing you to focus on specific content, or block content you want to skip.
Search capabilities
Finally, search capability is one area where the monolithic platforms currently have an advantage. It’s easy to globally search for a word, phrase, or hashtag on them. Mastodon, a federated service, makes some compromises about search. If you search for plain text, you’ll get posts you’ve written, favorited, or been mentioned in, as well as matching usernames, display names, and hashtags. So, it’s harder to find things on Mastodon unless (as the help recommends) members use appropriate hashtags extensively.
Reliability
In the early days of Twitter, the famous “Fail Whale”, indicating that the service was down, was a common sight. For the last few years, the platform has been very reliable, with only a few glitches per year. Whether this will continue after Musk’s firing of a majority of the company’s employees is an open question.
In my limited experience, rapidly growing platforms Mastodon, Counter Social, and Post News have been doing pretty well coping with their explosive growth. (Post News is currently limiting new signups from its waitlist to handle the increased traffic.) But all three services can be slow at times, though I don’t see much difference in responsiveness between them and Twitter.
OK, maybe you skipped the above to see what I think about individual platforms. Remember, this is based on my experience to date, and everything in this space is evolving fast. I’ve listed the platforms in my most-to-least favorite order. Here goes!
Mastodon
Mastodon has been around since 2016. Unlike the other platforms mentioned in this post, anyone with a certain amount of technical expertise can set up a Mastodon server. Currently, there are thousands around the world. Though there are some servers with large general memberships (such as mastodon.social which I’m currently on), most focus on specific communities or interests, such as tech, gaming, LGBTQ, region, activism, art, music, journalism, etc. Mastodon is a federated social network of these servers (which are also called nodes or instances). This allows users on different servers to interact with each other. (Here’s a good explanation of how Mastodon’s federation works.)
Joining Mastodon
You have to choose a Mastodon server. Many popular articles about Mastodon describe this as a barrier to joining the platform. Actually, it’s not something that you need to really worry about unless you’re especially interested in immediately finding a server that reflects a community about which you feel strongly. That’s because you can change the server you’re on at a later date, bringing your followers with you.
If you do want to pick a community right away you can use the tool Mastodon Instances. Or, the official JoinMastodon page lists available servers, categorized in various ways, and shows you which ones are currently open to join.
To find out more about a mastodon server from the server itself, go to its “about” page at https://[server name]/about/more, e.g., https://mastodon.social/about/more. This page includes rules of conduct for the server, additional services provided, and other useful information.
Once you’ve picked a server to join, getting started is like any other social media platform. You create an account on the server and set up a profile. On Mastodon, profiles contain up to 500-character bios and you can add a display name, avatar, header image, and up to four links to relevant websites.
Things I like about Mastodon compared to Twitter
No one owns Mastodon, it’s free, open-source software
This is a huge plus in my book. The beauty of federated social media platforms is that they are loosely-joined collections of communities that are responsive to users’ wants and needs, rather than the dictate to make money, or the whims of an erratic billionaire. Mastodon servers run mainly on volunteer time, with infrastructure funding coming from donations. (I support my server, mastodon.social, via Patreon.)
Federated servers allow you to choose a community that fits you, while still allowing connection across all servers
I summarized how this works above. For more information, these Mastodon introductions, listed easiest first –> most comprehensive, (1, 2, 3) should be helpful.
No ads!
Currently, I avoid seeing Twitter ads on the web by using Tweetdeck. (Mastodon’s “advanced web interface” looks like Tweetdeck; turn it on!) But the mobile Twitter app is filled with ads, which I don’t appreciate.
(Don’t get me started on Facebook ads. They are only tolerable on the web because I’ve installed F.B. Purity, a labor of love that I recommend.)
500 vs 280 character limit
Twitter started with a 140-character tweet limit which was raised to 280 characters in 2017. It’s often still not long enough for me. Mastodon’s 500-character limit is refreshing.
Editable posts!
Twitter, which has become much more a site for breaking news than a place to converse has always, understandably, been concerned that people would edit tweets post-publication to change what they originally said if it later became foolish or embarrassing. Given that people can still delete their tweets, this doesn’t work very well.
Mastodon allows you to edit published posts. I like this a lot! This feature lets me fix typos, add better hashtags and images, etc. There’s one other advantage for me right now. Currently, I crosspost my tweets to Mastodon using the Moa Bridge service. Mastodon’s editable posts allow me to tweak tweets into Mastodon posts that are more “Mastodon-like”, which typically means adding and adjusting hashtags.
Tweetdeck-like “advanced web interface” that allows you to follow #hashtags and lists
Tweetdeck is my favorite way to access Twitter. Mastodon’s “advanced web interface” provides something very similar.
Content warnings when needed
I like this feature. It speaks to Mastodon’s commitment to providing functionality that supports creating safer spaces for users.
One feature that Mastodon provides…is the option to attach a content warning to your posts. When a content warning is included, the status content will be collapsed by default, and only the CW will be shown, similarly to an email subject line or a “read more” break. This can be used to add a summary or subject for your post, to collapse long posts, or to otherwise provide context or setup for the body of the post.
When media is attached, a checkbox appears to allow you to “mark media as sensitive”. This hides the full media behind a blurred thumbnail by default. Adding a CW to a post automatically marks the media as sensitive as well. —Mastodon documentation
Favoriting and boosting (aka retweeting or reposting) are two clearly different actions
On Twitter, you can “like” or retweet a post. Twitter displays publicly a count of a post’s likes, which makes the platform a place where many users try to get their posts liked a lot. You can also quote tweets, allowing you to add a comment to another’s tweet. This is often used on Twitter to publicly dump on a tweet you don’t like, perhaps boosting your standing with your followers.
On Mastodon, you can “favorite” or repost (aka “boost”) someone’s post. The favorites count doesn’t appear on post timelines, so it’s not a status symbol of how popular what you say is. The only people who know you’ve favorited a post are you and the poster. Favorited posts are thus a way for you to remember posts you like. They are searchable.
If you want to promote someone else’s Mastodon post, you repost it. There’s no equivalent of tweet quoting.
Mastodon’s design distinction between favorite and repost discourages the self-promotion that sometimes runs rampant on Twitter.
You can migrate your account to a different server
As far as I know, there are no social media platforms that allow you to export or import your posts and followers to or from another platform. But Mastodon makes it pretty easy to move all your account data from one Mastodon server to another. You might want to do this if you discover a server that better fits your requirements (for example, one for users who speak your native language and post mainly in that language) or because your server doesn’t have as many members as you would like.
You can have accounts on multiple servers, so it’s easy to try a new server and compare your experience there before choosing to change servers.
Mastodon conclusions
Mastodon is my favorite alternative to Twitter, and I’m spending more and more time on it. It feels like the early days of Twitter: a fresh, relatively uncrowded, environment where I’m continually meeting new interesting folks. I’ve had many more personal interactions on Mastodon than any of the other alternatives I’ve tried. If the future of Twitter worries you, I think Mastodon is the place to go.
Counter Social
I joined Counter Social—founded in November 2017—in April 2022 after the news that Musk might acquire Twitter became public. I like the platform a lot, though Mastodon has stolen my attention recently. There was some initial concern that Counter Social’s sole(!) anonymous(!) owner “The Jester” espoused right-wing politics and had a history of hacking targets that he felt threatened America in the past. However, unlike Musk’s recent brazen moves, I haven’t seen any sign of a political thumb on the posts I’ve seen flowing past on Counter Social’s “Community firehose” stream.
Counter Social is free to join. It receives some income from $4.99/month optional “PRO” accounts but otherwise it seems that The Jester funds it himself.
Things I like about Counter Social
Counter Social members are darn nice!
This sounds silly and may change, but the Counter Social community currently comes across as the nicest large bunch of community folks I’ve seen on a social media platform. Now of course, what I call nice (a mixture of charmingly personal posts, eclectic artwork, restrained mainly left-wing statements, favorite music and movies) may not be what you think of as “nice”. New users are welcome. Browsing my feeds is…soothing. Can you say that about any other large social network?
Excellent interface
Like Mastodon, Counter Social uses a similar but more attractive “Tweetdeck-like” interface. Posts (aka “toots”) can be up to 500 characters, though you can’t edit them after you’ve posted them. You can’t see who has favorited or reposted a post until you click into it, and reply counts are shown as 0, 1, or 1+ which discourages people from writing posts solely designed to get lots of interaction.
Like Mastodon, searching is only on hashtags and usernames. There’s no plain text searching of posts like Twitter does. You get columns for friends’ posts and notifications and can create additional columns based on hashtag searches.
Counter Social has added to the interface a few features which you may like, such as a CNN ticker tape news feed and eight other news channel video feeds.
No ads and content warnings
Like Mastodon, as described above.
Praiseworthy, innovative approaches to reduce bad actors and disinformation
Counter Social has deployed a number of sometimes controversial anti-disinformation methods. The platform bans IP addresses from Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Pakistan (that’s the controversial bit), as well as a proprietary list of “over 100K VPN endpoints and Tor exit nodes that are known to be used by nefarious actors”. Counter Social has also teamed up with Bot Sentinel to reduce disinformation. And users can mute and block other users and flag posts for review.
I don’t know how Counter Social does it or whether my experience is typical, but the platform seems to do a great job keeping nasty stuff off my feed.
Concerns about Counter Social
Reliability
No one really knows if “The Jester” is actually one person. Even if he has a small team to help, the platform has been remarkably responsive, except when the service had to handle half a million new user signups in a few days in May 2022. Today it chugs along, though I wonder how many of its millions of registered users are actually active on it currently. Presumably, The Jester (or a hacker) could abruptly shut down Counter Social. What happens if The Jester has a heart attack or loses interest in supporting the platform? Such concerns have made me hesitant to invest significant time in Counter Social.
We don’t know the answer to these questions. On the other hand, what assurance do we have that Musk is not now rummaging through the vast hoard of data that Twitter has acquired over the years? Ultimately, you’re going to need to decide whether you trust using this service. My approach is that I don’t post anything that would embarrass me if (fat chance) it was widely publicized. And I don’t use private messaging on any service for vital information.
Counter Social conclusions
In one sentence: Counter Social is a really nice place to visit but I’m not sure I want to live there.
Discord
Discord is primarily an audio chat and instant messaging platform that became wildly popular with social gamers. So why am I including it here as an alternative to Twitter? Because Discord now makes it easy for communities to get together. In 2020, Discord shifted its focus away from video gaming toward creating and managing all-purpose public and private online forums for posting and chat. And in September 2022, the company introduced Forum Channels which support organized discussions, stored posts, and message threads: everything you need for an online community.
I joined Discord in July 2021, and currently use it in two ways. First, as a place for occasionally staying in touch with a small group of event production professionals, via a forum set up with four text channels. And second, as an interface for a Midjourney Discord server, which I use to create illustrations for some of my blog posts.
Discord is free to use for forums. Many gamer members spring for “boost” [$4.99/month] or “Nitro” subscriptions [$9.99/month], and Discord receives a 10% commission on games sold through game developers’ servers.
What I like about Discord
The Discord forum channel interface is easy to use. It provides a simple and attractive way to display and organize asynchronous conversations into threads. I like how a forum can have owner-created channels to cover broad categories of conversations relevant to the community. For example, the forum I mentioned above has channels for messages from the owner, requests for help, job opportunities, and general posts. My Midjourney public server has over a hundred channels that cover announcements, service status, rules, FAQs, getting started, polls, support for trial and paid users, various chats about the service, image showcase channels, and many channels where Midjourney images are constantly being requested and generated.
Concerns about Discord
As you might expect, Discord has been and can be used for nefarious purposes, such as cyberbullying, private use by extremists, and pornography and sexual exploitation. All social media platforms with private forums have these problems, which is why content moderation policies and the effectiveness of their implementation are so important.
It’s hard to beat Discord for a free, fully-featured, easy-to-use community messaging service of any size. Given its robust funding by gamers, I doubt that the service will fall out of favor any time soon. And because gamers who desire fast response time use Discord, the owners are likely to maintain reliable service.
The “Chief Poster”, Noah Bardin, was the CEO of Waze for 12 years and the company is financed by well-known venture capitalists. The platform ultimately aims to be a place where big names, especially journalists and “publishers” will congregate and opine on issues of the day.
“Post News is trying to capitalize on the ‘virtual watercooler for journalists’ side of Twitter. The platform describes itself as a place to access ‘premium news content without subscriptions or ads.’ News publishers and independent writers are encouraged to share their articles on Post News under a paywall. The idea is that this would allow users to pay for individual articles from a variety of news sources. It’s an alternative, or a supplement, to paying for individual subscriptions to specific news sources.” —Amanda Silberling, Post News, a Twitter alternative, gets funding from a16z
Only a rudimentary payment system using points is available to date. Time will tell if subscribers are willing to pay for individual articles in sufficient quantities to sustain the service.
Concerns about Post News
Unfortunately, I have many more concerns about Post News than things I like. Pitched as a “fun” place that “introduce[s] you to big ideas and cool people” Post News is, so far, underwhelming. It has a bare-bones web interface that pales in comparison to Mastodon, Counter Social, and Discord. Perhaps that makes it easier to use, but I’ve found even the simple interface glitchy with minor annoyances that Post News will probably fix soon.
Accessibility features that are standard on Mastodon and Counter Social, like alt text image descriptions and content warnings, are missing. Post News is US, English only, has no app, and you can’t add a video or animated gif to a post. Like Twitter, you can’t edit a post once you’ve posted it. The interface only supports a single feed of everyone’s posts. Post News allows you to flag perceived trolls but is still working on muting posts and blocking individuals.
The platform vibe
Post News has a broadcast-style feel to it. The platform seems to be attempting to create a hierarchy of news producers and news consumers, and that’s probably a deliberate choice. But what I find depressing is that the platform’s consequent vibe is a curious mixture of the trivial and pompous/promotional. It feels like a place where people are mostly trying to impress others. You can comment on posts, but comments are rare and there’s little evidence of conversations.
Post News is like a party where the guests are awkwardly posing instead of just having a good time.
The future of Post News
It’s very early days. Post News may well eventually become a viable marketplace for folks with great interesting ideas and the capability to express them well to grow an audience and make some money in the process.
However, I’m skeptical that this will turn out well for folks who put their significant content on the platform. Because, as I wrote in 2017, posting your original content exclusively on someone else’s platform puts you at their mercy. Third-party platforms change their feed policies (Meta, Twitter, LinkedIn) all the time, and if they go out of business (e.g., Geocities, Vine, MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, Google+) your content vanishes from the internet. I still strongly recommend you maintain control over your content by posting it on a website you own. That’s my two cents.
Things I like about Post News
The two things that I like about Post News are that posts can be of any length and that it supports plain text search. That’s about it.
Post News conclusions
I am clearly not a fan of Post News in its current state. But it still has plenty of time to improve. To be fair, I will be checking back on how it develops, especially to see if it can attract significant numbers of interesting and influential thinkers and writers who chose to post exclusive content there.
Hive Social
I was going to explore Hive Social before I wrote this review, but it’s been down for a week for security updates. So, I’ll summarize here what I like and dislike about this platform based on what I’ve read rather than from direct experience.
Many users describe Hive Social as a mixture of Twitter and Instagram apps. It’s been downloaded about two million times, though the current week-long outage may reduce future growth. Like Twitter and Counter Social, the service allows NSFW posts as long as posters categorize them with a content warning.
What I like about Hive Social
Like Post News, Hive Social has no ads and no character limit on posts. I’m a fan of “neutral” feeds on social media platforms, and Hive Social only offers a chronological timeline. Like most social media platforms apart from Meta, you can follow another user without them having to “friend” you back. The owner says the platform has “zero tolerance for bigotry and hate”, though, like Post News, moderation is currently restricted to reporting by other users.
Concerns about Hive Social
Hive Social’s sole owner with a minuscule staff raises similar concerns to Counter Social; what if the service is shut down or its data misused? Perhaps due to the service’s rapid growth, there are reports that the app crashes and service can be slow at times. Hive Social has no web interface, which is annoying to old fogeys like me. Finally, you have to wonder about the problems that are bound to arise if Hive Social continues to grow, given it currently has no moderators, no security team, and no staff focused on regulatory compliance.
Hive Social conclusions
Hive Social (when it’s back up and running) is probably a nice place to hang out if you’re young and aren’t especially interested in maintaining a long-term history of your social media interactions.
Conclusions
Some parts of this review of alternatives to Twitter will be out of date in a month, while some will stand the test of time. (Now if I could only know which parts were which!) And there are likely to be still more entrants in the Twitter-competitor space, such as Spoutible which is due to go live in February 2023.
Currently, Twitter continues to be a useful place for sharing my content and connecting with meeting industry peers. But its future is uncertain, and having taken some time to explore alternative platforms I thought I’d share my findings with you.
I hope this summary review is helpful and welcome your thoughts, comments, and experiences with these alternatives and any new platforms that appear. Please share in the comments below!
Something strange is happening in the world of Twitter. For well over a year my average Twitter impressions count has hovered at 2.0K impressions per day. (Twitter defines an impression as anytime a Twitter user sees your Tweet.) I’ve never seen that figure deviate by more than 5% (i.e. between 1.9 — 2.1K) for a long time.
And then, starting at the beginning of March, I’ve watched my daily impression count steadily rise to 2.7K per day. Every time I check, it’s gone up. That’s a 35% increase in one month!
I haven’t changed my tweeting activity in any way recently. I continue to post each day:
One tweet about my latest blog post
One tweet for each of an assorted selection of 8 of my older blog posts;
A tweet or two about my upcoming Participate! workshop; and
A few mentions or retweets of other users I find interesting.
All my other Twitter monthly count statistics: engagements, link clicks, retweets, likes, and replies are essentially unchanged.
Yet Twitter insists that suddenly, 35% more people are seeing my tweets!
I would like to think that I’ve suddenly become 35% more interesting, but I doubt that’s what’s going on.
Is anyone else seeing this? Any ideas about what could be happening?
A social media (SM) platform feed that is not a chronological list of all posts, and only those posts.
I am sick of social media platforms deciding for me what I should see. (Read this entire post for a rare exception.)
Every major social media platform started with a simple chronological feed of all the posts from all the people you chose to follow/be “friends” with.
But every platform subsequently FUBARed their social media feed. They dropped some posts entirely, and added content that you had never asked for.
Facebook’s news feed has been FUBARed since 2009.
YouTube has been messing around with search ranking of videos since 2012.
LinkedIn’s homepage feed became FUBARed in 2016, when the company folded in its “Pulse” content.
Twitter’s timeline got FUBARed in 2016. (You can turn off their adding “tweets you are likely to care about most”, but they still insert tweets “we think you might be interested in” into your timeline.)
Instagram stopped chronologically listing posts in 2016.
Google Plus has fussed around with its home feed algorithm for several years, but it doesn’t matter because — and I wish this wasn’t true — Google Plus is dead.
Here are three reasons SM channels do this. Feel free to add more in the comments. They:
Want to add sponsored paid content (aka advertisements) so they can make money.
Want to create incentives (like “boosting” your Facebook posts) to pay them to let more people see your posts.
Know that some of their users — the ones who “friend” or “follow” everyone — would quickly withdraw from their service if the resulting torrent of requested posts were actually provided.
No one likes reason #1 but we understand why SM platforms do it. They need to make money to stay in business. Fair enough.
Reason #2 is really damaging to the concept of a SM channel as a reliable communications tool. Old media doesn’t have this option: when you buy the paper or watch TV you receive the same content as everyone else. But today, two users who follow the exact same people on Facebook may see very different feeds, thanks to Facebook’s secret and ever-changing algorithm. Essentially, Facebook makes the feed unreliable so the company can make additional revenues. I find this unreliability infuriating, and it’s why I use Facebook as little as possible.
Reason #3 is understandable — but what’s annoying is there’s no way to turn this behavior off! It would be easy for SM channels to default to their algorithmic filtering but provide an option for users to say, “Just give me everything I’ve said I wanted to see. Yes, I know I’ll still get all the ads you insert, but I’d really like not to miss anything else.” I guess that they worry too many people would choose to see everything, and the incentive for organizations to pay them to boost content eyeballs would be reduced. In fact, I suspect that only a small percentage of users (like me) would pick this option.
Ultimately, I want a social media channel that doesn’t filter. I suspect I’m not alone. Let me pick what I want to see, and let me see it. All of it.
Is that too much to ask?
A reward for those who’ve read this far — an unFUBARed SM feed! I know one way to get an unFUBARed SM feed. From Twitter, no less — use Twitter Lists! If you create a private Twitter list of people whose tweets you want to see, you can view the resulting stream on Twitter at https://twitter.com/YourTwitterID/lists/NameOfYourList or via other Twitter clients like TweetDeck and the list is chronological and unfiltered! (Please don’t tell ’em; they’d probably FUBAR it immediately.)
Do you know other ways to get unFUBARed SM feeds? Feel free to share in the comments!
The effectiveness of Twitter as a connective social media channel is declining In July I wrote about why 2017 is a tipping point for Twitter, noting that the rate at which users follow established accounts has slowed dramatically. As the year draws to a close I’m seeing further evidence that conversations in the twittersphere are drying up too.
Companies are now marketing services for artificial intelligence matchmaking at events. However, unresolved issues could impede the adoption of this technology, especially by attendees.
Consider this marketing pitch for an artificial intelligence event matchmaking service:
“Using the [AI] platform…it’s easier for attendees to make sure they have the right meetings set up, and for exhibitors to have a higher return on investment in terms of connections with high-quality buyers.” —Tim Groot, CEO Grip, as quoted in What AI Means To Meetings: How Artificial Intelligence will boost ROI, Michael Shapiro, July 2017 Meetings & Conventions Magazine
A win-win for exhibitors and attendees?
Tim describes using artificial intelligence matchmaking at events as a win for both exhibitors and attendees.
I’m skeptical.
Let’s assume, for the moment, that the technology actually works. If so, I think suppliers will reap most of the touted benefits, quite possibly at the expense of attendees. Here’s why.
Successful matchmaking needs digital data about attendees. An AI platform cannot work without this information. Where will the data come from? Tim explains that his service builds a profile for each attendee. Sources include “LinkedIn, Google, and Facebook”, while also “scouring the web for additional information”.
Using social media platform information, even if attendee approval is requested first, creates a slippery slope, as privacy issues in meeting apps remain largely undiscussed and little considered by attendees during the rush of registration. The end result is that the AI matchmaking platform gains a rich reservoir of data about attendees that, without strong verifiable safeguards, may be sold to third parties or even given to suppliers.
In addition, let’s assume that exhibitors get great information about whom to target. The result: “high-value” attendees will be bombarded with even more meeting requests while attendees who don’t fit the platform’s predictions will be neglected.
In my opinion, the best and most likely to succeed third-party services for meetings are those that provide win-win outcomes for everyone concerned. Unfortunately, it’s common (and often self-serving) to overlook a core question about meeting objectives —whom is your event for? — and end up with a “solution” that benefits one set of stakeholders over another.
How well will artificial intelligence matchmaking at events work for attendees?
Artificial intelligence is hot these days, so it’s inevitable that event companies talk about incorporating it into their products, if only because it’s a sure-fire way to get attention from the meetings industry. I know something about AI because in the ’80s I was a professor of computer science, and the theory of artificial neural networks — the heart of modern machine learning — was thirty years old. AI had to wait, however, for the introduction of vastly more potent technology to allow practical implementation on today’s computers.
While the combination of powerful computing and well-established AI research is demonstrating incredible progress in areas such as real-time natural language processing and translation, I don’t see why sucking social media and registration data into a database and using AI to look for correlations is going to provide attendee matchmaking that is superior to what can be achieved using participant-driven and participation-rich meeting process combined with attendees’ real-time event experience. (Once again, exhibitors may see a benefit from customized target attendee lists, but I’m looking for win-win here.)
From the attendee point of view
When attendees enter a meeting room there’s a wealth of information available to help make relevant connections. Friends introduce me to people I haven’t yet met. Eavesdropping on conversations opens up more possibilities. Body language and social groupings also provide important potential matchmaking information. An AI matchmaking database includes none of these resources. All of them have led me (and just about everyone who’s ever attended meetings) to professional connections that matter.
Coda
I’ll conclude with a story. The June 2017 PCMA Convene article Can Artificial Intelligence Make You a Better Networker? describes a techsytalk session by Howard Givner where he “gave particular emphasis to the importance of facilitated matchmaking at events.” I like to think that Howard discovered this when he attended the participant-driven and participation-rich EventCamp East Coast I designed and facilitated in 2010, about which he wrote:
“…it was one of the most innovative and eye-opening professional experiences I’ve had. Aside from coming back with lots of new tips and ideas, I easily established triple the number of new contacts, and formed stronger relationships with them, than at any other conference I’ve been to.”
After years of predictable behavior, Twitter analytics reveal that something strange is going on with how Twitter is used.
Something is happening to Twitter, but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?
I started tweeting 14 years ago. Though I didn’t know it at the time, Twitter would turn out to be the most important way for people to discover my work and for me to connect with thousands of kindred souls all over the world who share my specialized interests. Over time, Conferences That Work grew into a website with ten million page views per year.
But as 2016 drew to a close I noticed that something was changing in the Twitter world. Here’s a graph of my follower count over time:
What I’ve noticed about my Twitter analytics over the last nine months Since I began posting in June 2009, the graph shows that I consistently added between two to three followers per day — until around September 2017. At that point, highlighted by the red circle, there was an unusual increase to ~six followers/day for the remainder of 2016, followed by a sudden flattening that has persisted through the first half of 2017 to less than one follower/day.
In 2017 I’ve also noticed a dramatic reduction in the number of retweets I’ve been receiving. Though I haven’t had time to develop quantitative statistics, it looks to me as though in 2017 retweets have been replaced to a large extent with likes, (though the frequency of mentions seems more or less unchanged).
Why are these changes happening?
I’ll begin with a caution that everything that follows is ultimately speculative. I can’t say definitively what is going on, and can think of multiple plausible reasons for these significant changes. For example:
My experience may not be representative of other Twitter users. A sudden surge of engagement with my posts during Q4 2016, was followed by a rapid loss of interest.
The US election results caused more people to visit Twitter for a few months, but attention eventually shifted to the continuous torrent of breaking news at the expense of general engagement.
Twitter user growth has been flattening for some time as per the graph below; my 2016 EOY bump is reflected in the graph’s Q1 2017 bump, but future official statistics will show little continued active growth.
Taken from statista.com on July 14, 2017; click on graphic to see current stats
In retrospect, 2016-2107 will be seen as a period when late adopters continued to join Twitter, but a critical mass of active users concluded that engagement on the platform was not for them and moved to other social media platforms (I’m thinking Instagram for one). Although Twitter seems to be doing well in percentage market share of social networking site visits, as per the statistics below, it’s becoming more a site that users visit for breaking news — engagement is moving to other platforms.
Taken from dreamgrow.com on July 14, 2017; click on graphic to see current stats
What do I think is actually going on?
I’d put my money mainly on #4 above. Perhaps this Twitter analytics trend has been accelerated by #2’s associated flood of U.S. breaking news (61% of my followers are in the United States). It will be interesting to see if the trend continues, which may help to shine more light on what, to me, are changes that are interesting and important for anyone who uses Twitter for connection, content marketing, and engagement.
What do you think is going on? Add your ideas in the comments below!
Friends don’t let friends give away their original content to third-party platforms I’ve been saying this for years, but do people listen? No they don’t. Don’t give away control of your content.
Let me be clear, by all means share your content for free on any of the gazillion social media platforms available. And if you can get paid appropriately for creating content for others, good for you. Otherwise, make sure that your content remains under your control. Don’t give away control of your content.
Why? Well, here are a few reminders:
Geocities was once the third most visited site on the internet. 38 million user-built pages! Nothing but a distant memory now, unless you live in Japan.
Remember when your friends saw everything you posted on Facebook? Not any more, unless you pay up.
Ah, those glorious days when you posted something in a LinkedIn group and a significant number of people would read it! Long gone.
Now the blog host site Medium announces a layoff of a third of its staff. There are millions of posts on the site. Will Evan Williams pull the plug some day? Will social journalism survive? Who knows?
Get the picture? Posting your original content exclusively on someone else’s platform puts you at their mercy. Don’t do it!
Though this route involves more work and/or money than posting on a third-party platform, you:
Control your own content. You can add, edit, delete, and control comments on it at any time.
Determine how your content is presented. Want to insert an offer for your services or products in the middle of a blog post? No problem.
Retain full rights to your content. (One example: the rights to anything you post to Huffington Post belongs to them. And they don’t even pay you for the privilege of writing for them!)
Build your own brand, authority, and SEO, not that of a third-party site.
Maintain access to your content. If your web hosting service goes bankrupt or is unsatisfactory, you can transfer your content to a new host. As long as the internet is up and you pay your hosting service, your content will be available.
Seven years ago I started the website you’re reading. As expected, hardly anyone visited initially. As I steadily added content (at least once per week) viewership grew. According to my weblogs, this site is now one of the most popular websites on meeting design and related issues, with 31 million page views to date, 25 million of which were made in the last three years.
As a result, this website is now the largest source of client inquiries for my consulting and facilitating services — something I would never have predicted when it went live in 2009. And the ever-growing body of articles on this blog and the inbound links to them continue to build my brand, authority, and SEO.
Are you attempting to build social media followers by drive-by following—i.e. following a batch of new accounts every day, waiting a day or two, and then unfollowing the accounts that don’t follow you back? STOP THAT! You are trashing your brand on social media.
Many people with social media bios designed to project a professional image destroy their credibility by using this “strategy”.
I suspect these are people that would never stoop to buying followers or likes. And yet ~30% of my daily new Twitter followers are drive-by followers.
Why drive-by following doesn’t work
Drive-by following backfires because it ensures that I’m extremely unlikely to want to have any kind of social media connection with you.
Here’s how it works on Twitter, my most important social media platform. I do my best to read the profile of every new follower. Rarely will I follow back right away unless you’re someone I know. Birdbrain, the excellent app I use to track Twitter followers, also shows anyone who’s unfollowed me. That’s where I get to notice that you’ve drive-by unfollowed me, typically within 48 hours of your initial follow. That’s when I make a mental note that you’re not a serious user of social media, just someone chasing a high follower count.
Instead, follow for a bit and post interesting stuff (I admit that mentions and RTs of me are nice too!) I may well follow you back.
What’s worse than drive-by following? Repeated drive-by following! I routinely see accounts commit multiple drive-bys, usually a week or so apart. My conclusion: either you are using a second-rate automated drive-by service, or you have a memory even worse than mine (which is saying something). Either way, your attempt to get me to follow you back is even less likely to succeed.
So, stop trashing your brand on social media! If you want to use social media as an effective marketing platform, don’t broadcast stuff about yourself all the time. Don’t implement elaborate plans solely designed to maximize your followers. Instead, post interesting stuff (both yours and others) and interact with people. Keep doing this. Over time, if you’re doing a good job, your followers will grow and be genuinely interested in your social media presence, and your brand recognition and value will increase.
There are privacy issues in meeting apps. I’ve written before about the lack of information about who has access to attendee information, and I’m concerned about the ramifications of the growing trend for meeting apps to offer login via one of the established social media networks, typically Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Perhaps you should be too. Social check-in is touted as a plus for event attendees, allowing them to:
discover friends, contacts, followers, and followees who are also attending the meeting;
provide in-app social network functionality; e.g. the ability to tweet from inside the app; and
be notified (in some apps) when social network contacts are in the vicinity.
These features are, indeed, potential pluses for an attendee. But there are downsides too, which are rarely mentioned.
Potential for abuse
When you authorize an app to access your personal social network information, you are allowing the company that created the app access to that information. At a minimum, this includes read access to your social media contacts in that app, which may (e.g. Twitter) or may not (e.g. FaceBook, LinkedIn) be public. If the app also requests write access, it can, in principle, do things like sending tweets from your account.
There’s potential for abuse here. An app developer can copy all the information that you expose to them and keep it forever, even if you de-authorize the app from access to the network later. Some questions that come to mind:
What will you do with the information I make available to your app?
Who will have access to it? For example, unless you pay LinkedIn big bucks you do not have access to every member’s information. But an app can (and in one case I’ve seen, does) expose every attendee’s LinkedIn profile to all other attendees.
For how long will you make that access available?
Will the app developer eventually destroy the information retrieved during the event?
What are the consequences if someone breaches the app’s security? Can the attacker take over the compromised social media accounts?
Clear answers to these questions are rarely given before you’ve (perhaps reluctantly) given the app permission to access your social media account(s).
Give participants a choice
In addition, some apps don’t give you a choice; you can only use them if you provide the app login via one of your social media networks. And if you want to share other social media IDs with attendees, e.g. your Twitter ID, you can’t just add the ID into a data field for your information but have to give the app access to your entire Twitter account.
I understand there are more stringent data protection standards in Europe, but the state of affairs I’ve described above is common in many of the U.S. apps I’ve seen.
There shouldn’t be privacy issues in meeting apps. I think it behooves app developers to provide clearer answers to these questions, and allow us to opt out from providing forced access to our social media accounts when we use a meeting app.
Last week I wrote about alternatives to Twitter, sparked by the rapid changes to the platform under its new billionaire owner. Focusing on our own professional community—the meeting (and hospitality) industry—I’d like to make a modest proposal for a social media platform that might meet our needs better. In other words: an #eventprofs alternative to Twitter. (And LinkedIn and Meta, too.)
Since 
In the early days of Twitter, the famous “Fail Whale”, indicating that the service was down, was a common sight. For the last few years, the platform has been very reliable, with only a few glitches per year. Whether this will continue after Musk’s firing of a majority of the company’s employees is an open question.
Something strange is happening in the world of Twitter. For well over a year my average Twitter impressions count has hovered at 2.0K impressions per day. (Twitter defines an impression as anytime a Twitter user sees your Tweet.) I’ve never seen that figure deviate by more than 5% (i.e. between 1.9 — 2.1K) for a long time.
Companies are now marketing services for artificial intelligence matchmaking at events. However, unresolved issues could impede the adoption of this technology, especially by attendees.
