The End of my Micro.blog Experiment

My numeric life is full of experiments. Micro.blog is one of them but it is coming to an end. There, I said it: bye-bye micro.blog. Here is why I’m leaving the microblogging platform very soon.

What is it, anyway?

According to @MacGenie, a prominent user of the microblogging platform:

The business of Micro.blog is blog hosting. The timeline is a network of bloggers, including people who just want to do short microposts. (…) We want to be the fastest, easiest way to start a blog at a very reasonable price.

In a sense, they are competing against WordPress.com. This is where this blog is hosted. The ability to cross-post from my own blog and have my very own small place is nice but does it add value to this blog? In retrospective, the answer is no.

The goods

But, let’s see what is right. There are many nice things about Micro.blog. Again, according to @MacGenie

We don’t have advertising, our timeline is strictly chronological with no intermediation via algorithm, we don’t sell our community members information, and we work hard at guarding our community from harassment and continually improving the platform.

I applaud the chronological timeline and when I discovered micro.blog, more than a year ago, I thought it was Twitter 2.0 or something like it but without the ads. I tried to write some original content there with a link to my Twitter account but it didn’t really help. Why? I have no clue. Maybe the simple answer is the lack of content quality or lack of readers. Or both.

The bads

But, who’s on micro. blog these days? Why is it so hard to discover new people to follow? (Read link post by Matt Birchler on this subject).  It is impossible to see who’s popular and attracting a lot of people. I don’t even know how many people are following me. Why this obscured view? I think these design decisions are part of the problem on this platform. It makes it look like a communist party. Don’t get me wrong, the comparison stops there. It looks like they want to promote some form of apparent user equality which may be a good idea on paper but in reality, it isn’t, for me at least.

Each social network has some sort of native client. Micro.blog makes no exception. Since this is an “open” platform, there are many of them out there. I also tried their native iOS application for posting and reading my timeline. While it works well, the app is limited by the platform design choices. It is a very simple platform to be on but for some reason, the speed is somewhat slow for the type of content available.

These are solely my point of view. Please, read this insightful post by Alan Ralph: Critique of Micro.blog. He is expanding on the idea that not knowing how many followers a specific user has could be a good thing.

Time to move on

Since my time is a scarce resource, I need to keep my focus on things that make a difference and with this micro-blogging space, it is not. My main blog is not getting any traffic from them. So, in the coming days, I’ll be closing my micro.blog and delete all my content, which I think, wasn’t really worth it after all. And I think I’m not alone. : Greg Morris is quitting. Alan Ralph too. This is sad.