Twitter has almost become completely worthless for new writers

platform capitalism and Cory Doctorow's theory of enshittification

Hello? Customer support? Can I talk to the manager, please?

When I launched my pseudonymous writing career in the summer of 2023, one of the things I was most looking forward to was creating my Twitter account and interacting with other interesting writers and intellectuals on the platform.

I’d been lurking for years.

For all of its faults, Twitter has historically been a place where you could reliably encounter some incredibly interesting people and ideas. I’ve often found myself bookmarking tweets because I’ve stumbled upon a genuinely novel concept that I’ve never seen represented elsewhere—schizoid gems like “psycho-security” in the context of memetic defense against state-sponsored psychological operations. I’ll often bookmark positive tweets about novels which similarly deviate from the aesthetic consensus in the world of traditional publishing.

Outside of books, social media remains one of the most important discovery engines—possibly the most important discovery engine—for getting exposure to novel or unique ideas. For the same reason, it’s a great system for finding great books that are well outside the mainstream.

While the discourse on Twitter is often heavily astroturfed or at least broadly shaped by various national security plants working hand-in-glove with the deep state apparatus, there’s still enough room on the margins for dissenting aesthetics and views to emerge and gain traction.¹

That is to say, it’s sufficiently chaotic to facilitate free discourse on the margins of the platform. My view is that this is a feature, not a bug. Social media platforms where dissident views are algorithmically kept at a low but non-zero level are inherently more survivable in the long term because they do not pose a substantive challenge to state power. This is because they are able to contain discontent within a fenced-off area: in the end, structurally limiting the memetic diffusion of dissident thought is the functionally the same thing as controlling it.

(By contrast, popular media platforms where the content recommendation algorithm is not under the functional control of the US national security state will not be permitted to exist).

Thus, we can think of Twitter as a form of “controlled opposition” where your complaints are permitted precisely because they do not have the requisite reach to effect actual political change. It’s a population-level psychological release-valve that you can find even in regimes that are not nearly as sophisticated as ours—the brilliance of our managed democracy lies in its ability to simulate the experience of the common man having political power.

Non-coercive systems of control (which incentivize correct behavior through pleasure) are orders of magnitude more palatable to human beings than their coercive equivalents (which disincentivize incorrect behavior through pain). It’s the difference between someone from the government kicking down your door and someone from the government jacking you off. You might not love either of these things, but the latter is much more comfortable.

What does this have to do with literary fiction?

Friends, forgive me my theorycel-ing on this subject—my mea culpa is merely to explain that everything is connected. Politics is downstream of culture, therefore, because the state is interested in politics, it is necessarily interested in culture. A novel is “just” a story, you might say, except that narratives and meta-narratives are the substrate of political narratives, the latter of which ultimately form the psychological & memetic structures that make Liberal imperialism so incredibly resilient and appealing.

Everything, in the end, loops back to stories, and in that sense, the class of story-tellers are the base upon which the entire pyramid is built.

This might sound self-important, perhaps, a form of mental masturbation, but it’s not because any individual producer of narrative is important, but because the class of people who generate compelling stories are the first step in an evolutionary system that selects and amplifies preferred narratives—a fusion of Darwiniain selection and intelligent design. Even if though it converges on a similar function, a film like American Sniper is a much more potent form of propaganda than Wolf Warrior because the former comes out of a system that starts from a generator function with many more degrees of aesthetic freedom.

Let’s circle back to literary fiction.

Tools like Goodreads recommendations or even Amazon’s algorithmically-driven book recommendations don’t have the same depth or breadth that Twitter does when it comes to organic exposure to authors who are under-represented in traditional publishing, fiction or otherwise.

This is especially true in an area of strict ideological and cultural conformity within mainstream publishing and media institutions. My current model of mainstream media is a sort of left/right fusion between Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent and

Curtis Yarvin

’s Cathedral model of decentralized consensus-formation among American elites.

For a more fulsome model of the American state, in general, I would suggest Aaron Good’s excellent book on the subject, diagrammed here:

Why Twitter sucks for new writers

In a word: Cory Doctorow’s model of enshittification.

Here is how platforms die:

first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Currently, Twitter is at step two: it’s abusing its users to make things better for its business customers.

The reason it’s doing this, presumably, is because the company hemorrhaged advertisers after Elon started running it, so management perceives a need to do absolutely everything possible to keep people on-platform and to maximize screen-time (and therefore ad conversion) on the website.

The way it’s doing this is by aggressively punishing links to any writing or content that is off-platform.

To me, it reads like a desperation-move in the wake of a massive hit to revenue, but there are other interpretation you could also argue. Cory Doctorow would likely say that this was inevitable: any company that prints money by monetizing your eyeballs is, in the long run, strongly incentivized to monopolize those eyeballs in as selfish and addictive a manner as possible. That it’s doing this at the cost of the long-term goodwill of its users is an inherent constraint of finance capitalism; an optimization function which often has great difficulty focusing on anything other than the next quarter.

I first noticed this problem when I began posting links to my SubStack articles on Twitter some number of months ago. Until then, I’d had a slow but gradual increase in my follower count on the platform to the several-hundred-mark, so it looks like my stalled-out growth coincided with increasingly aggressive adjustments to the Twitter algorithm that punishes writers who regularly post outbound links to their long-form writing. A couple of months ago, after consistintly linking to substack, my follower-count almost completely flatlined.

It’s gotten to a point now where my follower growth has crawled to near-zero for months, and I’m soon going to have to wipe my account to “re-set” the algorithm and hopefully resume subscriber growth. The only reason I haven’t done this yet is some combination of spite and laziness.

What’s the purpose of social media for a debut fiction author?

As far as I can tell, it’s three-fold:

1. To grow your audience for your novel.

2. To meet like-minded fans and writers.

3. (To a lesser extent: to post short-form writing)

That’s basically it.

Now, tell me, how can you grow an audience for your long-form writing if you can’t post links to your writing?

Basically, you have to be extremely skilled at posting, which, if you are a fiction author, almost always comes down to short-form comedy-writing or hyper-salient political commentary. Then, without ever posting any links to your blog or your novel, you have to grow your follower count to the level where it’s so huge that the small percentage of people who click your link in your bio follow that into your long-form writing off-platform.

My long-form stories contain very black humor, but I’m not a stand-up comedian on the internet, and neither am I warrior of the culture. This self-description captures the vast majority of fiction writers, especially literary fiction writers.

So—to summarize, items (1) and (3) are basically the same thing, and item (2) is (mostly) contingent on item (1).

That is to say: Twitter is almost completely useless for new writers. It’s gone from semi-useful (given enough effort) to a waste of time.

The main value of Twitter, at this point, is in DM’ing other writers who haven’t yet migrated to SubStack, which, not coincidentally, has also implemented it’s own messaging function.

Comparing Twitter to SubStack

I’d estimate that I’ve put in about 10% as much effort into SubStack Notes as I originally did into Twitter. On Twitter, I have about 500 followers for 100 units of effort. On SubStack Notes, I have nearly the same number of followers (359) for about one tenth the effort.

These followers, in turn, convert at around a 10% rate into newsletter Subscribers, some small percentage of whom go on to buy my novel.

At this stage, I think it’s abundantly clear that SubStack should take up the majority of a debut author’s efforts. On average, newsletter subscribers are simply more engaged than Twitter followers, and are much more valuable since they can also be exported off-platform by exporting your e-mail list (a huge, huge advantage if this thing ever goes to shit like Twitter did).

In the near-to-medium term, I’m extremely bullish SubStack, which continues to reliably outperform Twitter in terms of providing deep value to fiction authors.

I am, however, less optimistic in the long-term for the platform, simply because its growth, if successful, will inevitably bring about greater pressure from (a) the market and (b) the national security state/disinformation-complex (i.e., from formal and informal state propagandists).

In comparison to the dopamine/attention unit economics of traditional social media sites, it’s fantastic that SubStack has more incentive alignment with writers insofar as it has a marketplace model where it takes a percentage of your subscriptions, but this will not prevent abusive & extractive practices should the platform achieve near-monopoly status like Amazon did (in that scenario, the financial imperatives will simply be overwhelming).

In this respect, I’d prefer that SubStack remains at its middle-of-the-road level of success instead of 10x’ing or 100x’ing in scale.

With regard to (b), I am far less sanguine. It takes very little to attract the attention of the blob, and the platform has already come under withering attack from the prestige media and a various NGO-ghouls in particular. I’m not interested in the vaccine debate, but it’s notable that people are complaining that SubStack has merely outsourced censorship to the payment processor Stripe. PayPal is notorious for being the worst offender on this front, but they’re probably all going in the same direction.

The payment layer is likely to be one of the primary levers of intermediated censorship that rises in prominence as the alternative media economy continues to grow—I’d love to see SubStack begin to accept crypto payments, but I’d imagine this is impossible for political & compliance-related reasons.

Still, I love the platform as it currently is. It’s a phenomenal discovery-engine for fiction authors and one that I don’t hesitate to recommend.

At the end of the day, the two things that most protects freedom of expression for authors of literary is (1) its niche audience, which isn’t very attractive to cultural commisars, and (2) the labor-cost of manual censorship on centralized platforms.

Because of our unstable political situation at home, and because of coming advances in LLM-delivered content censorship, I think neither of things is going to last, and we will eventually need to migrate to something genuinely decentralized.

But that, my friends, is a topic for another day.

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While you’re here, consider checking out my debut novel—two big reviews in literary magazines are incoming (I can’t say much else for now!).

Read all the current reviews here.

1. For those of you who are more interested in the cultural anthropology of online cultures, check out

Katherine Dee

’s excellent Default Wisdom.