Things were going great; I guess I should've known...
On Getting Kicked Off Of Twitter
Things were going great; I guess I should've known...
The Beginning Of The End
We'd been running The Syndicate, a social audio podcast on Twitter, for almost two years. We had everyone from Dr. McCullough who disproved dark matter to the former Chief Data Engineer for the NSA on the show, and the audience was now starting to grow. My account had 2,500 followers; not much, but enough to be dangerous as a Headhunter hunting for top talent in Tech during the AI gold rush.
I'd been writing the imprecise Theory of Everything using Twitter as a decentralized forum for peer review, free from the limitations of the institution.
On the other hand, Joseph had just committed $250.00 for us to start the Hackathon. Dan paid for the no-code app hosting, and that was that. Hackathon started.
A few days later, my account was suspended without warning. No reason given. Just suspended. Everything got deleted.
And that's how it all got started. I started a new account, and started building again.
Monetizing Socials
Over the next two weeks, we figured out how to turn $325 into almost $3,000.00 of paid bounties to developers who created everything from AI music videos for grammy-award winning hip-hop artist Krayzie Bone from Bone Thugs to solutions for governments in LA, doctors in Australia, and churches in California. Today, an entity we now call The New Dev Order has generated over $30,000.00 for its members, putting AI in the hands of the startups and business owners on the ground trying to invent the future on a limited budget.
But that's not where we stopped. Turns out, that was just the beginning.
What does it mean when you can be kicked off a social media platform in an era when social media is the primary sales channel for young brands, whether shoes or software?
In other words, how soon before someone decides you’re the next Kanye West or Alex Jones or Dr. McCullough? Don’t think it can happen? It can. It happened to me.
It’s actually happened to me multiple times. I have 4k followers on Linkedin but have been shadowbanned there. I’ve been banned from Medium as well. It gets tired after awhile.
When friends asked, I played it off. I told them that having my account deleted was invigorating…and it was, but it was…sobering.
Sobering in the fact that everything that I publish can be wiped away in a moment’s notice. Makes you think of the undeleted aka immutable ways data might be preserved.