Tag Archives: Twitter

1st Post in 2568BE, Year of the Snake (2025 CE): My 3 Months on BlueSky

26 Wednesday Feb 2025

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DJT, Vance, Musk and company have been in the ultimate seats of power for a month.

After quitting social media in 2021, I dipped back in as one of a dozen million people who joined the open source social media app BlueSky after the election.

Can you say “dozen million?” – sounds funny because of the end alliteration. Well, 12 million people.

BlueSky went from 12 million to 24 million users in my first month on the site, November 24th to December 24th. It has slightly more than 31 million users now.

In my three months using it, I learned it was a sanctuary space before I joined: a creative space and safe space for people of all types. I learned that its open source construction led to a collective creation of tools that allow for better, more nuanced blocking, muting and white/blacklisting. It’s a positive community of well-grouped threads and feeds. I really like it there. sweet.

I don’t belong, but that’s not BlueSky’s fault.

I don’t belong on X/Twitter, FB, IG, TikTok, or any other social media.

My experience on BlueSky these past three months merely confirmed it.

I’ve never had a Facebook account, and was on Twitter, pre-Musk, for exactly ten years (from April 4, 2011 to April 4, 2021). I have an Instagram account for Giants Baseball Corner, but I’ve never used it.

I told myself I was participating in Twitter to observe the pulse of the community, nation and eventually world. I joined in 2011, year of the “Arab Spring,” in which Twitter played such a predominant role.

But ultimately I found it to be a distraction I no longer wish to engage in. So, I stopped posting after ten years. Then Elon bought it.

When Twitter was fresh it was cool. But it’s well and truly rotten now. Muskified.

I sought that feeling of fresh Twitter when I joined BlueSky and it has that, but with 31 million users, it is an exponentially smaller community than X, and users are mostly in the United States – Japan, England, maybe.

By contrast, X has 600 million users around the world.

When you make a noise there, it’s a wake wave on a lake, as opposed to the shared laughs we have in our pond of ripples on BlueSky.

my skircle

Because most people have an X/Twitter experience in their rear-view mirror, the composition of the BlueSky community comes with a built-in cultural protection. If I am posting there, I’m consciously trying not to spoil it. I find myself tempered knowing the community is sane.

But I realized that, having been off social media (or socials, as they’re now called), I just don’t know how to communicate properly on them. Instead, I overshare precious material, like and repost my echo chamber’s stuff and only once in a while find valuable reading material.

And it’s a huge time suck. No, I’ll stick with blogging thanks very much.

It’s late February and this is my first post of the year because I’ve been traveling, and in studio making art and contemplating what I am going to participate in.

At the moment, I am in studio working on oil painting, large collage pieces and starting to write again.

I expect I need to isolate even more to do some of this stuff, and I can.

so …

see ya when I see ya

mtk

The Inn at San Francisco

09 Friday Aug 2024

Posted by in 2024, Commentary, S.F.

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It’s a narrow but quiet and well-appointed spot just off Union Square on Post. My sixth floor room has windows that open and I can see the back of the immense billboards that surround the square and the bronze woman atop the Philippines War Dewey Monument within it.

Dedicated to Admiral George Dewey, it commemorates his victory in the Battle of Manila Bay during the Spanish–American War. I want to replace it with a massive Foucault’s Pendulum.

The ‘coffee at 8am’ is in a small, cramped area and the guests all stood around trying to get what they wanted from a selection of muffins, bagels, bread-y treats, yogurt and fruit – or created plates to carry back to their rooms. I grabbed a slice of cold bread stuffed with spinach and a coffee and left.

It’s meagre and the coffee is plain, boring. They had oat milk, though – amazing how swiftly that became popular in the last few years. I came back to the room and discovered this is a hotel owned by The Oxford Collection. It is quiet, and tucked away.

It’s the weekend of Outside Lands, a music festival held in Golden Gate Park that I protested when it was proposed. It’s a terrible idea to have drunk, drug-addled youth partying to loud, crazed music sets in that idyllic microsystem.

I have never been and will never go. In any case, of the hundred or so acts appearing this weekend, I have heard of exactly two. I am old and irrelevant to pop culture. It doesn’t interest me either. I use Radio Garden to find new music or vibes. I use playlists that I mix to listen to otherwise.

Speaking of the drunk, drug-addled tech crowd that have ruined San Francisco for a decade, the company formerly known as Twitter, to which we gave the insane tax-break in 2012 that allowed them and Zynga and the rest of these assholes the ability to move here … is now leaving San Francisco. As announced by that ignorant, half-wit Elon Musk this week.

So what was the point?

This town has been made worse, less humane, less sensitive and cultured, less tolerant even, by the social media crowd who came here, used it like a snot rag, and now spit on it as they leave. Good riddance. I will always hate you. Stay away, you ruinous ignorant cunts.

My Thousandth Tweet

31 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in S.F., social media

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Recently I posted my 1000th Tweet:

“1000th Tweet: Twitter’s useful but cluttered. You have to tweet a lot to get good at it unless you’ve a weird knack. Reading others is best.”

As a critique thus far, I think those 140 characters do it. I won’t recommend Twitter, but I do find some value in it. I will continue to read and post there, which is a huge surprise to me given how I began:

A little less than a year and a half ago, amidst the San Francisco Mayor’s Race, but before Interim Mayor Ed Lee was allowed to run, SF Board of Supervisors Chair David Chiu (himself a Candidate for Mayor) led the Board and the Interim Mayor to The Great Twitter Giveaway of 2011, which ended the strictest controls on corporate investment in public space in the country: SF’s city tax on companies wanting to do business here.

They shattered our City’s progressive history functionally to create a tax-break to entice Twitter to make its base in San Francisco. That was when I started my first and only Twitter account @mtksf and posted my first tweet:

“Twitter doesn’t deserve the tax break on stock options. They stand to make tens of millions at IPO!”

I stand by that first tweet, there was no reason to give Twitter the taxbreak, which is being extended now to other social media and tech companies. They all want to be in SF.

The Board and Interim Mayor Lee failed to represent our city’s values and changed our city fundamentally.

Those Mayoral candidates used the tax-break to gain money and support for their campaigns from corporate interests, railroaded the Board and City into giving up millions of dollars that could have gone in the General Fund and, far worse, shat on long time businesses that have stayed in SF choosing to contribute to our bottom line when it would’ve been cheaper to leave.

I started using Twitter as a part of my Campaign for Mayor in an attempt to bring  light to these and other issues I have with contemporary SF politicians – a wholly bought-out crew of pawns for special interests.

But I continue even now to use, read and post to Twitter, which has grown on me. I use it primarily to read others and to find important links sent by intellectuals, writers, news and sports reporters,actors, producers, comedians and athletes.

Twitter Giveaway’s First Big Blow: POOF! Goes the Zynga IPO

02 Friday Dec 2011

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Zynga, Incorporated, one of the two large tech companies (with Twitter) who railroaded Mayor Ed Lee and the SF Board of Supervisors to pass the Twitter Giveaway, will be making its Initial Public Offering in the next two weeks.

Zynga’s IPO price is settling in at about $9 billion and the company hopes to raise as much as $925 million.

If the tax-break given to Twitter extends to Zynga, it nullifies the long-standing SF law that would have given 1.5% of the sale to the City.

We will be losing nearly $14 million. That’s nothing to Zynga. They could negotiate it into the offer.

14 million dollars. <poof> just like that …. because of the political aspirations of Lee and Chiu…

Thanks Mayor Lee, and Supervisors Chiu, Farrell, Kim, Weine, Elsbernd, Cohen and Mar. You’re morons on this one.

That’s our new Mayor and Board President at work in the new SF.

Twitter Giveaway's First Big Blow: POOF! Goes the Zynga IPO

02 Friday Dec 2011

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Zynga, Incorporated, one of the two large tech companies (with Twitter) who railroaded Mayor Ed Lee and the SF Board of Supervisors to pass the Twitter Giveaway, will be making its Initial Public Offering in the next two weeks.

Zynga’s IPO price is settling in at about $9 billion and the company hopes to raise as much as $925 million.

If the tax-break given to Twitter extends to Zynga, it nullifies the long-standing SF law that would have given 1.5% of the sale to the City.

We will be losing nearly $14 million. That’s nothing to Zynga. They could negotiate it into the offer.

14 million dollars. <poof> just like that …. because of the political aspirations of Lee and Chiu…

Thanks Mayor Lee, and Supervisors Chiu, Farrell, Kim, Weine, Elsbernd, Cohen and Mar. You’re morons on this one.

That’s our new Mayor and Board President at work in the new SF.

NEVER tweet a no-hitter

08 Sunday May 2011

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There’s a well known jinx in baseball that if a pitcher has a no-hitter going through five innings you don’t mention it.

It will guarantee its end.

Today, I tested the jinx against Twitter. I tweeted after the 5th that the Giants’ Ryan Vogelsong had a no-hitter going after five, purposefully, stating the experiment in the tweet. The very next batter hit a single and broke up the no-hitter. check the tweets @KarthikRajanSF

Lesson: NEVER tweet a no-hitter.

… best to do these things early in the season when the games don’t matter as much. That’s our Manager Bochy’s philosophy … and our GM Brian Sabean seems to agree. I am growing to understand it myself.

Go Giants.

The Birds in SF Share Better Than the Board of Supervisors

24 Sunday Apr 2011

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Last year, I documented birds near the Mid-Market Exception Zone that know how to share.

and now I see it as a metaphor for what the Board of Supervisors and Interim Mayor Ed Lee failed to understand about the laws they are changing, beginning with The Twitter Giveaway of 2011.

We have been talking about being afraid of the Manhattanization of San Francisco for some time now – at least since back in the 90’s – and yet we have been unable to resist this rampant development of condominiums and new structures that no one here can afford.

I see now that all these empty dwellings have been built for new employees of all the new Twitter-like businesses that will be arriving because the Board and Mayor Lee have struck down one of the pillars of our very strict tax code – brand new san franciscans most, since they rarely hire local folk.

New, young stylish grads from Yale and Harvard, MIT and Stanford, at least some of whom will be of the type we have seen already – the ones who avoid-eye-contact and civic responsibility, enrich themselves, vote for development and sit/lie laws and aid the driving out of what they deem unsightly: the unwanted poor, the homeless, the ten- and fifteen- and twenty-year San Franciscans who have just managed to survive as the cost of living has skyrocketed. At least some of them will be the Manhattanizers.

But with the upcoming vote over Treasure Island Development I’ve realized a new fear:

The HongKongification of San Francisco.

Do these pro-business, high energy politicians think we should be growing like the last decade that has created these dense cities of Asia? Do they see unlimited space for growth? Do they not know about our long history of containing that growth for aesthetic reasons and civic responsibility?

San Francisco should stay a sweet, small City with its own identity: one of tolerance, compassion, care for our smallest citizens and local businesses. We can develop our new 21st Century SF, but we don’t have to do it like the Asians have or New York did. We should do it our way: slow and steady.

Vote Karthik Rajan for Mayor, an Independent outsider who will stand up to corrupt lifelong politicians and the dozens of interests that support them.

I will demand for all of us that we scale down the SF economy for four years. I will then use half of that time to audit and evaluate our Departments and the current unchecked growth; will identify and reduce waste and re-organize, restructure and reboot the City for a better future for our children.

I will not seek re-election and I will return $400,000 back to the City’s Board and next Mayor upon departure from office, as stated in my first Campaign promise, so, if you vote for me for Mayor, when my term is done, I will give $400,000 plus interest back to the City.

Vote Karthik Rajan and we will pay less for a better quality of life.

Karthik Rajan, Anti-Crony, Says the Board Failed with Twitter

07 Thursday Apr 2011

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Interim Mayor Ed Lee, Head of the Board David Chiu and novice Supervisor Jane Kim rushed the City into a relationship with Twitter and have failed to represent SF’s citizens in recent negotiations concerning Twitter, Zynga and other corporations.

We wouldn’t know if it weren’t for the Bay Guardian. Now we do know that to some in City Hall, this year of Interim Mayoralty is meant to cement the candidate who will represent corporate interests in the Mayor’s race. This Interim group of leaders has just erased a long-standing principle in SF that defended us against corporate raiding of our precious town.

Twitter is an amazing technology and is nearly single-handedly changing the way we communicate. San Franciscans should be proud of this remarkable company. But Twitter and other startups should be obliged to share their biggest gains with the citizens of SF. If they cannot, then they don’t share our values. What should have happened is a serious negotiation, with specific terms that make demands of Twitter and other companies to invest in SF and help us bridge deficits.

Vote for me, Karthik Rajan and I promise to be serious about the cost of living in San Francisco. Check the video below for more.

The Twitter Deal – Mayor Lee and Supervisor Chiu Cave In

05 Tuesday Apr 2011

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Moving right along, I now have a twitter account:

@karthikrajansf

and am following San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee and Board of Supervisors Chair David Chiu, who are tweeting away with great vigor about how we all need to sign their petition and support their plan to Keep Twitter in San Francisco!

The irony isn’t lost on me. I rented an apartment in the Mission District for $400 a month just 15 years ago and now a great big black bus from Google delivers employees to and from my old neighborhood so they can pay $1200 a month to live there.

The SFBG is right on this one and kudos to Steven T. Jones and Tim Redmond for their great work these past few weeks exposing what is basically a terrible break from precedent, guaranteed to gentrify neighborhoods and raise rents for everyone living in them.

The Twitter deal exemplifies the changes in San Francisco government, policy and culture that I am protesting in my appeal for your vote for Mayor.

We want good companies to come to San Francisco and stay here, but we want them to invest in our city – not take from it.

At stake is a small percentage of the stock options of Twitter employees – which are bound to be worth tens of millions to our city when the company goes IPO – and my chief opponent and the Mayor are just giving away those funds. More importantly they are trashing a hard fought right to demand that corporations that come to our city commit to investing in the welfare of all our citizens and not just their employees.

It’s a sad day in San Francisco. The Twitter deal is a nightmare that sets a precedent we don’t want and makes us vulnerable to dozens of other companies making similar demands.

Mayor Lee and Chairman Chiu are dead wrong and if it upsets you as much as it does  me, Chris Daly and the SFBG, then please cast your vote in November for me, Karthik Rajan, for Mayor of San Francisco.

It is time to set right the course of our city back to the values we all cherish: compassion for the homeless, the poor, renters and immigrant communities – and away from corporate protectionism.