For football fanatics, Twitter (X) has been a great place to have discussions over topics or get the latest news from journalists in the easiest way. The growth of the platform amid football fans has helped many self-starters like Fabrizio Romano gain a huge boost in popularity.
The surge in popularity also enabled football clubs to form their own social media division to get the biggest interactions from supporters on Twitter and help with the fan engagement product.
But it seems like that happiness experienced by the Football Twitter fraternity by interacting with each other on the platform, be it bantering, debating topics or just following the news updates, has started to wither.
Fans are finding it difficult to stay on the platform because of a horrible issue with robotic accounts ruining the experience.
Because of the growing popularity of the platform and the impact of monetization that was brought onboard after Elon Musk took over, more people have registered for the website in the aim of earning some easy money.
A large number of bot accounts who have taken to relentlessly spamming others posts in an effort for interaction-farming. These accounts are sometimes even real people just making the use of ChatGPT or similar AI software to create replies for them before they copy-paste it to posts.
These accounts have now infiltrated the Twitter Football scene as well and made it a headache for any football fan who visits the comments sections to get into debates. An example would be the kind of comments on Sky Sports’ tweet of Gilberto Silva giving some advice to Arsenal.
“Why are people leaving Twitter for Bluesky???” pic.twitter.com/NxLV7W7fQi
— Zach Lowy (@ZachLowy) November 18, 2024
This is all because of Musk introducing a new monetization scheme for people, guaranteeing a higher monetary return the more interactions their tweets get.
The system of the Twitter monetization scheme is rather interesting. For one, a user needs to be subscribed to the X Premium scheme and have a blue tick to be viable for getting any payments. The payments are usually based on how many interactions a user can manage to get on their posts or replies to other posts.
For example, if a user can gain 1 million interactions a day for an entire month, then they’d be getting a return of around £200.
The comments sections of posts made by prominent football journalists, news outlets or even popular fan accounts are now filled with such robotic replies.
This has infuriated a lot of genuine football fans who have used this platform as a means of debating and interacting with fellow or rival supporters.
Feel a little bit like an 80 year old learning how to text and don’t really know what I’m doing but I’ve packed my bags and *migrated* to that place where the sky is blue if you’d like to follow me, or if you just want another place to call me names.
— Adam Crafton (@AdamCrafton_) November 14, 2024
As a result, many football fans are starting to move to BlueSky – the newest alternative to Twitter.
BlueSky has seen a surge of new accounts ever since Donald Trump won the US Presidential Elections, with many liberals opting to leave Twitter as they felt it’s a platform that now encourages racism, homophobia and allowing people to be openly offensive.
Not just fans, but multiple football clubs have also voiced their desire to leave the platform.
Bundesliga clubs Werder Bremen and St. Pauli both posted statements recently announcing that they will not be posting any material on the platform anymore, slamming the rising hatred and discrimination happening on the platform and claiming that they’ll be posting materials on BlueSky instead.
Quite a few football journalists have also left Twitter to join the platform because they’ve grown tired by the lingering issues on Elon Musk’s platform.
Unless Musk fixes the horrible bots issue and their interaction-farming tactics, more and more football fans might start leaving Twitter and look for alternative options to having quality discussions in the likes of Reddit or BlueSky.
