Ever since El0n added the view count to tweets, I've been thinking about how I supposedly I have just over 2,700 followers on my twitter account, but some of the tweets I write get maybe 400 views if they resonate well or get liked / retweeted at all. Most get between 100 - 200 views according to Twiter.

Which is a terrible ratio of followers to views.

I really don't care how many views my tweets get. I write them for fun as a form of a work water cooler, or cathartic shouting into the void.

But for anyone putting effort into Twitter for marketing or business reasons, it's got to raise alarm bells for how effective it actually is to use Twitter anymore.

I couldn't finish this draft of a post off in a meaningful way, so Dave Karpf wrote a much more thoughtful deeper dive into how El0n is telling on himself and Twitter by adding the view counter, Twitter Tumbleweed Watch:

Thanks to Elon adding the view count to the native Twitter app, we’re now constantly reminded how many people are actually seeing our tweets. For me, at least, what Elon revealed is that Twitter is a megaphone equipped with dying batteries.

He compares his 42,000 Twitter follower views to the 2,300 subscribers to his newsletter "views", and not surprisingly, Twitter comes up short:

If I’m getting 2,000-3,000 views through Twitter, and ~2,300 views through Substack’s email distribution, then my Substack has already reached the same effective size as my Twitter following.

I take no delight in dancing on Twitter's deathbed. It's been an amazing source of community and connection for me, personally and professionally. I do, however, delight in pointing out when an arrogant, ignorant prick makes a $42 billion dollar mistake, and won't admit how badly he's screwing everything up for the rest of us.