Views from the Hellsite fire

Obvi I have to talk about Twitter, but I promise that we end on a good note

November 10, 2022

Here We Go! 

Bi-weekly publishing means there are a lot of links this week. So let’s get into it! 

Platform Updates

Instagram 

The Rest of Meta 

TikTok

Twitter

YouTube

Google 

Pinterest (Disclosure: I work at Pinterest) 

Patreon (Disclosure: I used to work at Patreon)

Discord

  • Not news, but if you are a chill, nerdy, queer person missing Twitter, DM me for an invite to the Discord server I started with some Twitter friends. It’s a great little community so far. 

Twitch 

Snap 

Tumblr 

Adobe

Telegram 

Signal 

Zoom (sure, why not, let’s throw them in here too)

Culture Movers 

Film & TV

Music 

Creator Economy 

Gaming 

Scams

WTF Elon?!?

Twitter has somehow been even more of a shitstorm than normal, and the forecast is only calling for a future of more shit. Honestly, thank Cher I decided to take last week off writing this newsletter because last Friday was pretty dark and chaotic with Elon and his war room of yes-man-children firing half of the company. By Sunday, we got word that the Fail Whale Council was already trying to get some laid-off employees to return to work on the Bird App. Bi-weekly or even weekly is just not the best cadence for covering the stomach-churning whirlwind of rumors, palace intrigue, and product changes happening over at Elon’s $44 Billion Mistake Factory. 

So here’s what we’re gonna do. Going forward, I’m going to focus on high-level changes to the company and actual product changes that ship. Because odds are, by the time I write and send this newsletter, the current state of the more detailed stories will have changed. If you want to follow the twists and turns of this disaster in near-real time and in more detail, I do want to leave you with some resources. 

Platformer and Casey Newton’s Twitter - Casey and his newsletter Platformer are a great resource for following many of the topics I cover in this newsletter generally, but they’ve been doing a great job covering Twitter these past few weeks. 

Hard Fork - If you like Casey’s writing, you can get more of his work in audio format from the new NYT podcast Hard Fork he hosts with Kevin Roose (who is also great on Twitter).

Kara Swisher -  Kara has also been great about breaking stories from inside Twitter. Including the scoop that advertisers were changing their ad buys DURING a conference call where Elon attempted to reassure them. If you like podcasts, she has two: On With Kara Swisher and Pivot. 

Verge / Vergecast - Vergecast is gonna be good for folks who don’t want the daily play-by-play but would like a weekly recap of the highlights. For a while, several years back, they had a regular “this week in Elon” segment, so they are pros at covering his particular brand of nonsense.

Nandini Jammi - She’s one of the co-founders of Check My Ads, an ad industry watchdog group, and was part of starting Sleeping Giants, which focused on alerting brands to the very-not-brand-safe sites where their programmatic ad buys were showing up. She’s been great at covering the brand safety and advertiser flight angle of this story. 

Now here are the major changes from Twitter this week: 

Not gonna lie; it feels like the app might just stop working at literally any moment. If you’ve built any kind of audience or community on Twitter, I highly recommend sharing how folks can connect with you on other platforms and seeking out the people you want to stay in touch with off Twitter. 

Now for something completely different 

Did you know that there’s a new TV series based on Anne Rice’s novel Interview with a Vampire? Well, there is, and it’s fantastic. The whole first season is out now, so you can sign up for an AMC+ trial and binge eight episodes. You may be thinking, “we’ll I’ve seen the 1994 film, is this different enough that I should watch it too?” I’m here to tell you that you absolutely should watch the new show. 

Interview 2022 starts several decades after a version of Loius and Molloy’s 90s interview took place. Memory and motivations have changed with the passage of time, and now we’re getting a different look at a familiar story. It’s a great way to approach a remake. The show knows we know at least the high-level plot points already, so it acknowledges that with its narrative structure. 

The show also changes up Louis’s origin, making him a black businessman in 1910s New Orleans. The romantic subtext of Cruise and Pitt’s Louis and Lestat is replaced by a TEXT text romance. It all works together to create a darker, richer canvas for exploring the story’s themes of loss, longing, and alienation. And if you are looking for fandom outlets away from Twitter, there’re great fan conversations around the show on Tumblr (spoilers here obvi, go watch it first) you can join.