Site Updates: New Discord Chat, Social Media and The Skinny

NinaIllingworth September 22, 2019November 17, 2022 Anarcho Nina Writes Chat, banned, Can't You Read, censorship, comments section, Contact Page, Discord Chat, Facebook, Mastodon, Media Matters, Nina Illingworth, Patreon, Patreon Blog, Rec Reads, Recommended Reading, Site Updates, social media, The Skinny, Twitter

Editor’s note: I’ve tried to write this post four or five different ways and every time it just keeps getting longer and longer. Today, I’ve finally given up and I’m just going to try to keep you all abreast of the changes to my website and writing schedule as briefly as I possibly can – style be damned.

Twitter Suspension, Social Media and Contacts Page Update

As the title of this section suggests, the seemingly inevitable has finally happened and the mass reporting campaign that has continuously targeted my work on Twitter for months, has finally succeeded in getting both my personal and business accounts (@EIWBM_Cat and @NinaWritesStuff) permanently suspended. On the one hand (as you’ll see below) there have been some positive side effects; namely that I appear to be writing a lot more now that I can no longer use Twitter as a crutch to work my way through feelings of sadness and dread. On the other hand, the obvious downside here is that I’m now doing that writing for many fewer sets of eyeballs and a lot of former readers still haven’t found my other social media accounts to find out why I’m gone from Twitter.

This unfortunate state of affairs now makes me even more dependent on encouraging readers to share my work wherever they congregate online and out of the goodness of their hearts, help me find my audience. To that end I’ve recently updated the Spread the Word” page with links to social media sites where you can share my work and suggestions about precisely how to do that. Obviously this is merely a request from the author, but please do keep in mind that having more readers interact with my work makes it much easier to continue to present all my content without a paywall or service charge of any kind.

In the meantime please remember that you can always find me on Mastodon, on Facebook and at my new Discord Chat room “Anarcho Nina Writes” which we’ll discuss a little more in a later segment. As a result of these various changes, I’ve also updated this website’s “Contact Page” to reflect my new online realities. Although I did repeatedly warn readers that the day they wouldn’t be able to find me on Twitter was coming, it’s very clear that not all of them branched out to one of the other social media websites I use – so if any of you kind folks who’re reading this do see a former mutual friend, please feel free to point them to either this post or that Contact Page.

My Recent Absence, Offsite Writing and the Skinny

For readers who want the full details of why I spent most of July and August yelling on Twitter instead of writing, please check out this long, extremely personal and regrettably edgy essay I wrote recently on my Patreon blog.

The “short-short” version of this story is that I got frustrated, burnt out and more than a little bit depressed. This in turn made it a lot more difficult to summon the necessary focus to write long, academically sourced essays and Twitter or Facebook are really just better online mediums for brief, scattershot and emotionally-charged analysis – especially since nobody gets angry if you can’t be bothered to scour the internet for multiple sources to back up your assertions for bad faith critics in the grip of ideological furor.

Unfortunately and even despite the fact that I am back to writing, much of this “fear and loathing” is still clinging to my brain like a wet napkin and aside from a few essays that I’ve recently re-shared here on ninaillingworth.com, most of my current work consists of fairly informal, opinion-based analysis with light sourcing, spread across the various websites I write at. Although readers using their desktop browser can always find links to the other blogs I write at along the top menu bar of the main page on this website, it has recently come to my attention that this is a little bit harder for mobile browsers because the menu is presented as a pull down tab on the left hand side of the screen. Here then is a list of links to the various other blogs and websites I publish my work at online:

Can’t You Read – A Tumblr Blog With Images

Nina Illingworth’s Patreon Blog

Media Madness on Blogspot.Com

The NinaDotCom Facebook Page

Please be assured dear reader that I believe this situation is somewhat temporary and in the meantime I’ve been slowly working myself back into form by posting shorter snippets of analysis on Mastodon and Facebook while getting Prado to share a daily thread I write just for Twitter. Are you concerned that don’t have the necessary amount of time in a day to actively follow three different kinds of social media? Well that’s not going to be a problem because I’ve also taken the liberty of creating a curated (and edited) collection of this social media analysis ever weekday on my (completely free) Patreon Blog in a new feature called “The Skinny” – you can find the September 19th edition here, and the September 20th edition here.

Of course the unfortunate downside involved in both The Skinny and my recent decision to begin sharing essay-length posts individually here on ninaillingworth.com is that some users who are following multiple websites are occasionally going to get duplicate notices from separate blogs for the same content. This problem has of course been looming ever since I originally decided to start spreading my work across multiple platforms to fight online censorship and sadly, I’m not really sure there’s a whole heck of a lot I can do about it. As much as I’d love to just post everything here on ninaillingworth.com and do away with all the other websites, the end result of that arrangement is that Google’s proprietary search engine with ensure that almost nobody reads my work – just like it has for organizations like Truthout, the World Wide Socialist Web and Naked Capitalism (far bigger websites than mine.) Please accept my apologies in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Introducing Our New Discord Chatroom & Opening Up the Comments

At this point I should also mention that in an effort to build a community around my writing and stay in more regular contact with readers, I’ve opened up the Comments section of all posts on ninaillingworth.com to everyone, whether or not they’ve signed up for notifications. With the exception of some obvious word-filters, anyone and everyone is free to post whatever they like underneath every article on this website going forward. Please note however that this is not a democracy and if you post something that I think is objectively false, spammy or will in any way actively damage the community I’m trying to build here – I’m just going to delete your comment the next time I get around to logging in. Please folks, I’m imploring you not to make me waste time and energy deleting a bunch of reactionary spam on my website; I’m going to be busy enough nuking marketing bot spam from orbit.

Finally and in that same vein of building a community, I’d like to announce that I’ve recently opened up a Discord Chat Room called Anarcho Nina Writes. You can join the chat by clicking the button labeled “Chat” on the top menu bar of ninaillingworth.com’s front page or you can just click on one of the two links I’ve provided below. Discord’s basic chat service is free and you can use it either with a downloadable app on your phone, or with the Discord login page on your desktop browser. There is no password required to participate in the Anarcho Nina Writes chat and everyone with the exception of cops and nazis are more than welcome – but please be advised that reasonable human behavior is expected; don’t be a big enough jerk to force a mod to kick or eventually, ban you. There are currently fifty members of the chat-group (some more regular than others) and the forum is divided into a number of sub topics which you can access through a menu on the left hand side of your screen. Please click on either one of the links below to join the chat now if you’re interested: