Goodbye Twitter & Facebook. Hello upstarts.

With the publication of this article, the Twitter and Facebook accounts/pages for Hudin.com and myself, are completely deleted.

I realize it might be hard for those in the wine world to give up these platforms. There are after all people who have thousands or even tens of thousands of followers and a supposed following that they’ve built up for years. I get that. I’ve been on both platforms since the beginning with my account on Twitter dating back to March of 2008.

It’s bittersweet, but at the same time a tremendous relief to be rid of them. I of course realize that there may be those out there who decry this as bending to the “woke mob” and if so, they can go tweet in the void about it as much as they’d like. But the truth is, no matter your politics or viewpoints, both of the platforms are simply terrible and unusable at this point. This isn’t anything that’s the slightest bit new, but today, January 20th offered a good moment to finally do away with them.

These were platforms that allowed wine people from all walks of the industry to connect with one another. For anyone on the outside, it’s probably a bit hard to understand why this is so important, but given wine’s need to be produced in remote, rural locales muddled with those selling and promoting it being on the road all the time, social media had offered a great platform to stay in touch with like-minded folk.

The problem became the same as it always has been which is: growth and profit. In order to achieve both of these, Facebook was run into the ground. If you want more coverage on this, go read Ed Zitron’s latest article. As for Twitter, it’s just gone off the deep end ever since Musk bought it out. I’ve covered that in detail here and here.

But beyond watching the slow trainwreck of these platforms from the cheap seats, it was clear to see that people have been achieving exceedingly little with them despite having those thousands of followers they’d worked so hard for. And those who appear to have more reach are undoubtedly paying for it on Twitter but turning off their paid-for blue checks. I say this as people I respect a great deal and used to have no end of interaction on their accounts (as they hold actual influence) show little if any activity when and if they post anything these days.

And if just trying to use these platforms wasn’t an act that’s painful enough, then there are the comments and interactions on them that makes it all-the-more painful. This Australian spoof video illustrates this exceedingly well and why the best way to interact on a platform such as Twitter, is to never reply to any replies on a post.

While people have decried how awful Twitter & Facebook are for a long time, what seems to have made a difference at this point is that there are finally some alternatives to the Musk-o-Zuckerverse. Go and check out Bluesky if you haven’t yet. Great gobs of wine and other folks have managed to find their way there and it’s feeling a lot like Twitter circa 2010, except without the growing pains, and there are system functions already baked in to deal with The Unpleasants. For example a well-known antagonist in Wine Twitter tried to bait me into one of his typical, trolling replies which was very easy to ignore. Bluesky, as it’s not engagement nor algorithm driven, doesn’t egg you on to feed the trolls and it doesn’t work as this “hate engine” that boosts posts purely for the sake of enraging everyone.

Or it could be the fact that we all know how to deal with these things now. As another example, I took a swipe at Zinfandel which wasn’t fully the intent of the post, but it was split between people liking it and people calling me out on it. With those who replied, we had a couple of posts and that was that. It was all very civilized and honestly, it’s how things used to be for Twitter. It was an age that I still pine for, which, yes, makes me very old despite only being “mostly” on the wrong side of 40.

In terms of Facebook, in closing my account, I’ve lost the pages that I had, but the visibility there has been even worse than for Musk Era Twitter. I lost interest in posting a long time ago and losing all of this is not actually a loss although this kilometerage will vary for different people. That and a lot more interesting things are happening at LinkedIn these days. This is a vastly different platform than it was back in 2010 when I’d thrown in the proverbial towel on it and for the wine community it seems to be an exceedingly good fit. Once you push past all the “Top Secrets to Top Growth in the Top Markets” gurus, there’s a stability to people posting and engaging which again, feels a bit like Facebook before the Cringe Lords went and enshittified it.

Unfortunately we’re still stuck with Instagram and WhatsApp for the time being, although for the latter Signal is an excellent alternative if they could just see a bit more critical mass there. There is hope on this horizon to rid of us of the horrible thing Instagram has become as the Bluesky team is launching “Flashes“. Despite the fact the name was probably created by young, male engineers given they don’t realize the connotation for a certain age group, what has been shared so far shows promise and this is great news as there’s not really been an Instagram substitute so far. That’s been painful as out of all the platforms out there, I actually enjoy Instagram, but it’s quite depressing as to how manipulated it is and I’ve seen interaction plummet to nothing in the last five years despite users being at an all-time high.

And this is all without even delving into Substack. That’s been a tremendous benefit to many people I know in the writing sector of wine as it’s given them a place to connect that’s completely new. While many have launched their own review platforms, for anyone who only needs the newsletter format, there’s a lot that’s excellent there and most importantly, you build a following free from Twitter and Facebook using this crazy thing called “emails”. Please connect via my newsletter if you haven’t already.

While I won’t dig into the whole TikTok thing given that it’s a very different situation, it seems (and I very much hope) that we have some alternatives that can give us the connection and reach that we all enjoy. And, if it comes down to Bluesky needing a monthly subscription, I’m damned-well happy to pay it if that means it can succeed, without ads, algorithm, nor a very sad and unfunny, “Edgelord” glowering down from his lucrative, yet clearly miserable empire.