No more “Going Live Tweets”! – Instead: Here’s a “Going Live Thread” :)

Today, I wanted to talk about something streaming-related… or rather social media presence based on conversations I had with a friend that is very good at it. I’m not good at it at all but it made me change my ways, hopefully for the better.

This post is about “going live” tweets and why I’m gonna stop doing them… and what I’ll do instead.

While this post (according to WordPress) has only a read time of 6 minutes, I know that some of y’all are very busy people and I value your time… which is why I’ve got a bit of a thingy here where you can skip to specific areas of the post if you don’t care about the context or the “why”!

1. Context
2. Problem: Why are “Going Live Tweets” bad?
3. Solution: Going Live Thread
4. Credit
5. Conclusion

Context

So, when you stream on Twitch, a great place to let others know that you’re live or that you have scheduled or special streams, or heck, a great place to connect to other streamers and engage with their content is… Twitter.

*gasp*

“TWITTER?! OF ALL PLACES?! TWITTER! How preposterous!”, I hear you scream at the screen right now.

And yes, Twitter. Honestly, I found a good bunch of people to watch thanks to Twitter… and it helps me signal-boost their special announcements and takes and whatnot… You can engage with others on topics… or you don’t.

Honestly, Twitter is great – if you do the regular trim… and if you regularly curate your feed to not make it a cesspool of twats being twats and dicks being dicks.

Anyway, what most streamers on Twitch/YT/Trovo/FBG/etc. do when they go live is… basically spam.

They… They… They spam your feed with “going live” tweets and cause you to want to unfollow or mute them. It’s horrible, innit?!

I say “most streamers” but I mean that in a “me included” kind of way btw. I’m not as bad as others. I literally found someone yesterday whose whole Twitter is just going live tweets… my Twitter account at least also features my shitty takes, my very good blog posts, retweets of cute animals and great art, as well as my good takes!

Problem: Why are “Going Live Tweets” bad?

Well,… they don’t really do anything. I mean, yes, you get the occasional click onto your stream through it and it may work wonders if you seldomly stream and don’t have a fixed schedule… but most people will just scroll past them. A friend told me that he just ignores them, actually.

On top of that, if you scroll down someone’s profile on Twitter and it’s just “going live on twitch dot blablabla”, then chances are that you don’t want to follow them necessarily because of the fact that this is probably what you’ll see on your timeline as well.

And well, then there’s also the argument that a lot of times, going live tweets are only seen when you’re already no longer live. I often see these tweets way too late because of my timezone, sleep schedule, and whatnot… and then I click on the link, and people are no longer live.

In those instances, I’ve now clicked on the link but am being redirected to an offline page of a channel I wanted to watch. Frankly, I’m disappointed and regret clicking on the link.

At last, there’s also an argument for statistics but I won’t make that because fuck numbers on Twitter. Who cares about them anyways? Rather, I’d like to mention that if you tweet often, Twitter doesn’t display everything to everyone.

There very much is an algorithm of some kind in place! Depending on how many people someone follows, Twitter may not show them many of your tweets. In those instances, you don’t want them to see your going live tweets when you could very much show them a good take on politics (that’s what Twitter is about, right?) or a cute cat picture (that’s what the internet is about!) instead. Right?

Solution: Going Live Thread

Going forward, I’m going still going to publish these tweets… but instead of a “Going Live” tweet every time that I go live… I’ll do it in a thread.

This has two benefits:

First of all, it’s all in one place and can be muted.

Second of all, it still does what it used to do but now it can be muted.

Yes, this is technically just one benefit… but it’s a good one so I had to paraphrase it and then mention it again to really sell my point here! Uh, wink wink nudge nudge.

When you’re on Twitter and you’re following someone for their art or their amazing rabbit, you don’t necessarily care about their going live tweets, especially when they stream during a time when you’re busy or asleep. Hell, maybe you just don’t watch streams but you’re still interested in this person’s tweets…

So, now you can mute the thread, meaning that you don’t see the going live tweets unless you want to. Easy Fix!

This is not about discoverability or anything like that… Rather, this is about choice.

If you don’t want to see the tweets, simply click on the tweet on Twitter, go into the settings for the tweet, and then click on “mute conversation” or whatever option there is. You simply won’t get notifications for it now.

Credit

I didn’t come up with this idea.

This idea is inspired by two people that I’ve seen do this or something akin to this.

The first one is NinaMarie on Twitch aka @PersocomNina on Twitter. She has had a going live thread in the past over here. I’m not sure if she still does make use of that thread but NinaMarie is pretty darn cool. She was (I believe?) the level designer for Tacoma which is super nice.

The second one is Krikket from NerdGirlThoughts aka @OhaiKrikket on Twitter. She has a Wordle thread on Twitter over here that I muted pretty much instantly when the Wordle craze started and when I got annoyed by my timeline getting flooded by– Anyway, I digress. Krikket is great, go follow her.

Conclusion

Nothing really changes. It’s just about how I’ll use Twitter from now on. Instead of doing the annoying bit of pasting my Twitch link onto people’s timelines, my Twitch link will just vibe in my Twitter bio. Instead of frequent “going live” tweets which can only be escaped via the options “Mute Magi” and “Unfollow Magi”, people now have a third option that is much, much easier: “Mute this thread.”

I think this is a good choice. I’ll try it out and I’ll see how it goes.

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.