One Tweet and a Tall Tale of being Thunderously Unpopular
I hate social media (and the world) and they both hate me back
On Saturday night/Sunday morning, I tweeted the following in the insane asylum otherwise known as Twitter
“Should you be wondering what the weather is like in Colombia, South Carolina, find a stream of the Liverpool/Manchester United game and the commentator will almost certainly tell you roughly every 3 minutes…….”
OK it’s hardly rib tickling stuff and you had to be watching the pointless friendly encounter between England’s two most successful football teams in the wilds of America in a money making series of friendly matches before the Premier League season kicks off here in 2 weeks but the commentator mentioned the stormy, overhead conditions and threat of thundery, lightning streaked showers that were imminent, any minute, nearly every second sentence for the duration of a dull game and easy 3–0 victory for my brave boys in Liverpool Red. His commentary, frankly, was as boring as was the action on the field but that isn’t the point here.
The nut of this brief dive into the utter pointlessness of my existence within social media (and life itself) is I used the hashtag #LFC and 1,231 people around the world viewed my tweet. But it took over 36 hours for anyone to “like” my tweet (a kind Yorkshireman who supports Leeds United — oh the irony) and so here we are, a single tweet getting a substantial amount of views (for me) and yet it took a long term social media friend to “like” it and way past when it could conceivably be termed in any way relevant.
Why this brief and murky belly flop into the shit infested waters of social media? Because whether it’s Twitter or Instagram (Facebook doesn’t count as it’s mainly my family and old friends and they just shake their heads at what I’ve become and would disavow all knowledge of me under questioning) or Medium or Substack, the pattern of my anonymity continues.
So we’ve already established I’m wasting my time on Twitter so let’s look at Instagram and what a hoot that is. 300 “followers” (deliberate use of quotation marks) and despite constantly posting the maximum of 9 images per post and all real life pictures taken by me I get TWO “likes” and one of those is from a Liverpool fan who clearly feels sorry for me. Medium? 1,400 “followers” (VERY deliberate use of quotation marks) and absolutely zero engagement whatsoever. Medium is full of scammers and spammers and shithouses and children of The Matrix crying constantly about when they’re going to get their Stripe payments for posting absolute dogshit copied and pasted from the internet, and I’m not even going to admit to my follower/subscriber numbers on Substack as quite frankly I’m an embarassment who should be beaten with sticks and dropped head first into a 100 foot well.
From a throwaway tweet we reach the end of this particular waste of everyone’s time, being that I’m wasting my fucking time regardless of what or when or how I post anything to social media. According to someone on Medium “if your writing is that good, you’ll be found and acknowledged”. Not a strict representation of his words but near enough. The old “Anyone can be President” was never true, it certainly isn’t in the 21st Century of social media and it’s the last refuge of a scam artist or someone deeply, deeply delusional. How can my well rounded, thought out prose compete with videos of cats and dogs doing funny things or some shit for brains on Medium copying and pasting “7 reasons to visit Egypt” or even the constant stream of badly written, incorrectly spelled tweets from someone who starts his tweets with “Bro” or “Bruh” or “innit” and other fucking words that don’t fucking exist, let alone “I’m not gonna lie” or “To be honest with you” or “Let me be clear”.
The answer is I can’t.
The answer is no-one reads anything I post on social media.
And considering I desperately need to sell the books linked below means I’m fucked.
