A gratifying but also really fascinating note from TPM Reader MG explaining why he finally made the decision to sign up after reading the site for many years — the role of evolving readers habits and the decline of Twitter are very interesting to hear and also match some of my own experience. Needless to say, if you’d like to join MG in signing up, just click right here …
First of all, thank you and thank you to the entire TPM team for the top notch work you all do.
I’ve been a TPM reader for as long as I can remember and frankly feel a little sheepish that it took me this long to pitch in to support the work that you do. At some point, probably when my work life got crazy busy and I didn’t have as much free time, I started relying more on my Twitter feed to keep up with the state of affairs in the world. My Twitterverse largely consisted of all of the writers I had always been reading before but eventually I stopped reading their work and was instead just scrolling through the feed to keep up with the news. Not mindless scrolling….I felt like it was providing a play by play from a variety of sources that I trusted. But I wasn’t clicking through to anyone’s actual reporting anymore.
Then the slow erosion of Twitter began.
I had been using Tweetbot, a third party Twitter client, for years but Elon cut off the API for third party clients and that put an end to Tweetbot. I had never relied any of the native Twitter clients or the website itself and when I gave it a try again I couldn’t (and still can’t) see how anyone can use that mess of a site. So I gave up on Twitter. That was hard but I just can’t bring myself to hating a user experience for the benefit of a self-centered prick.
TPM was the first ol’ reliable that I came back to. Half of my Twitter feed it seemed were TPM peeps and TPM alums who had gone on to other successful endeavors. Whatever you’re doing to cultivate talent over there Josh, keep doing it. It was long overdue for me to pitch in for the effort and now I’m glad to be back as a TPM reader and a TPM supporter.
