Ask Paul: July 7 (Premium)

Happy Friday, and welcome to what has to be the longest Ask Paul I have ever written. This one is epic, and full of great questions. I hope I rise to the occasion at least some of the time.
Twitter vs. the world
ggolcher asks:

Safe travels!

Thanks! We arrived safely, with little drama. (A bit of a delay, but given the flight situation this summer, not at all horrible.)

Unless I'm misremembering, you've expressed a desire to move away from Twitter, but have not been able to find a viable alternative. Are you considering trying out Threads?

I will be writing what I think will be a long editorial on this topic as soon as I can. There’s a lot going on here, and in the space of just a few days, I feel like this situation has changed a lot. It’s very interesting (to me).

But to answer your question, yes, I will be using Threads to some degree, and I signed in with my Instagram account yesterday (I think, given the travel, it feels like weeks ago) just to get that going. At the very least, I will be auto-posting from Thurrott.com to Threads (as we do on Twitter and Mastodon). But it’s possible I could be more active. More on that soon.

Regarding moving away from Twitter, that too will be part of that longer coming conversation. But there is a lot going on there, and I feel like it warrants addressing it here to some degree. So…

There’s no logical argument that Twitter is “worse” under Elon Musk, but from a more subjective point of view (i.e. my opinion), I just can’t stand the guy and his rampant spread of misinformation while pretending that he’s about free speech. He’s a nutjob.

But I also use Twitter in ways that may be a bit different than most readers here, as it’s the biggest social media presence I have by far, and I can’t just throw up some ideological excuse for leaving. I have to separate my disdain for the man from my need for the service. This isn’t that hard: the people who have owned companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft are just as terrible in their own ways, and while some people do use that as a reason to not use those companies’ products, here too I have to be a bit more pragmatic. (You can see my opinions about people/companies in the starker light by observing what products and services I use personally, by the way. A lot of times, it’s just the lesser of two evils, as when comparing my only choices in smartphone platforms: Apple and Google are both terrible.)

Leaving opinion aside, until this past week, Twitter’s technical terribleness has not impacted me. I want to be very clear about that: I may personally hate what Twitter has become, but as far as using it as a tool to drive readers to the site, there has been no impact at all. It’s important that we be able to separate the opinion from the objective facts.

And now that’s no longer true: we used to have a Twitter feed module on the side of the site that commingled the Thurrott Feed tweets with my ow...