Letter from the Editor: As of July 1st, owing to censorship by Twitter, we are halting publication of relevant content on the platform.
Rarely do we post Letters from the Editor. But, today, we felt with the updates to Twitter ‘terms of use’, we are taking action. But first some background on what lead us to this decision.
When it was in its infancy, we created an account, @nwbeerguide, intending to promote articles on our website. Besides this, we shared our experiences both regionally and abroad, through tweets and images. This approach it would seem got the attention of many peers, who enjoyed our content, encouraging others to ‘follow’ us, earning us thousands of followers. But, like so many services that ask nothing from its subscribers, Twitter eventually deprecated posts based on engagement and subjects.
This has led to a slow decline of audience from a peak 15,000+ to around 11,000 over the span of around 5 years. We naturally asked our audience what might inspire them to unsubscribe, with answers mostly about tweet frequency. To that, we made a commitment to promote an article once. But the numbers continued to decline. Then, in 2022, with the sale of Twitter to Elon Musk, our tweet engagement was made public. This, naturally, exposed that thousands of followers (on average) never see our tweets.
On average, out of 11,000+ “followers” we have an engagement of around 350 per tweet. This only served to further the retreat of audience and subscribers. Then came the “labels” affixed to news organizations and government figures. Which, of course, led to the famous departure of NPR (National Public Radio) and its journalists and subsidiaries leaving the platform. Eventually, Twitter re-evaluated its policies and changed the way news organizations like NPR were labeled/identified. But it was clear where this platform was heading.
So, a couple months ago, with our audience continuing to shrink, we evaluated what our next steps might be. Hence why we’ve mainly focused on retweeting other accounts’ content (including peer writers and journalists) rather than our own content. But on July 1st, Twitter took the unusual step of punishing unpaid, unauthenticated users from having infinite access to user tweets. Specifically, the following was shared by Elon Musk, owner of Twitter, on July 1st.
“Elon Musk @elonmusk
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we've applied the following temporary limits:
- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day
19:01 - 7/1/23”
Roughly translated, if you are not a verified (aka Blue Checkmark) user, who scrolls through your timeline of tweets, you’ll be blocked after 600. If you’re a paid user, you’ll get blocked after 6000 tweets in your timeline. Finally, if you’ve recently signed up, you can only review 300 tweets in your timeline. The result for all users will be a message stating that you’ve reached your limit. For us, an account that reviews what the brewing world is saying on Twitter means it diminishes our access unless we wish to spend around $100 per year. As we are an independent news source, one without advertising, this would be yet another cost we will have to take on. So we’ve elected to no longer support this website with content. Well, not relevant content.
As of today, we will no longer be sharing articles or media associated with the brewing industry. If you are someone that has followed us in the past, who sees this action as antithetical, we understand if you wish to “unfollow" us. If you want to continue supporting our prior work, which is still accessible here, we ask that you remain a “follower”. If you are someone that only recently heard about us, we ask that you still follow us, to help our work remain relevant in search results. And, we recognize some will take this news to come across as another entitled account, drawing attention to itself. But, we mean this sincerely, we are just like you all, prone to depression and anxiety, when a platform takes a massive shit on your motivations.
But, under Twitter’s rules, we will occasionally post something. But we can assure you it won’t apply to our content. Maybe a kitten picture or a limerick. Who knows?! But we won’t be deleting this account in the near-term. Mostly because we have so many articles and comments that have been shared.
We hope most will understand why we are no longer supporting this platform. We know some of you will look at this letter as unnecessary. But we honestly can say we feel this will be best for our emotional well-being, but we understand if you “unfollow” us.
In conclusion, thanks to all of you who remain on this platform. We ask that you support beer journalists throughout the Pacific Northwest, the United States, and the world by liking or retweeting their tweets, following their accounts, and engage in the work that they do.
If you wish to support our work, we have re-focussed our efforts with the following platforms.
Instagram: https://instagram.com/nwbeerguide
Tumblr: https://nwbeerguide.tumblr.com
Mastodon: Via Universeodon https://universeodon.com/@beer
Counter.Social: https://counter.social/@beer
All the best,
Paul Orchard
Founder, Editor, Contributor, (supporter, stunt liver, amateur photographer, et al.).
The Northwest Beer Guide
