After nine years of dutiful tweeting, SimpsonsQOTD has pulled the plug
The creator of SimpsonsQOTD, a Simpsons fan account started in 2013, has decided to stop tweeting
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Twitter is not doing well right now. Since dissolving into anarchy within days of Elon Musk buying the company and implementing his big-brained new ideas for running the site, the future of the social network has started to seem pretty grim. Though it’s hard to tell how this mess will resolve itself in the end, certain news makes it clear that Twitter will never really go back to how it once was.
For instance: Long-standing institution SimpsonsQOTD has now closed shop after nearly a decade of tweeting jokes from the show.
Insider’s Andrew Lloyd recently spoke to Charlie Southern, the guy responsible for the account, in order to learn why he decided to pull the plug on nine years of daily Simpsons posting last week. Basically, as with just about everything that’s gone wrong with Twitter lately, it’s Elon Musk’s fault.
“Twitter is obviously changing,” Southern explained, “and it’s obvious over the last couple of weeks that the changes are coming through.”
Southern told Insider that his decision to abandon the account was made partially in order to spend more time on “personal commitments” but was sped up by “concerns about the recent takeover on Twitter and how it may affect the platform, such as the potential that fan or parody accounts could be shut down.”
He said that he never expected the project to get as big as it did anyway, only having started it while working a reception job “where he was mostly left unsupervised” back in 2013. @SimpsonsQOTD blew up very quickly, eventually reaching its current 634,000 followers thanks to Southern tweeting Simpsons jokes roughly three times a day and timing certain clips and screenshots to coincide with current events. (It’s not hard to spot what might have been on his mind while tweeting in recent weeks.)
Though he won’t post anymore, Southern “has no plans to remove the existing tweets.” He’s also happy with the more than 13,000 Simpsons quotes archived on the account, saying that he wants “people to get on there and see something that’s nostalgic or funny or something that just makes them feel a little bit better.”
With the end of SimpsonsQOTD, Twitter has lost another reason to bother checking in on the site and provided another sign that its best posters may not be sticking around for long. For now, at least, we still have Dril, even as he prepares for the likely event that “this site croaks and i gotta post somewhere else.”
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30 Comments
The AV Club*insert entire article here*
Those are ice cream men.
I honestly would have figured it was a bot at this point, pulling from a pre-filled out list of Simpsons quotes and associated pictures drawn from the Frinkiac database.
There was a 90s nostalgia account that I used to follow on Twitter which was initially run by a person before becoming bot-run after a certain point (around late 2015 I think) and began to just repeat all of the same tweets over, and over again for several years (including several very specifically 2015 things) before finally going silent around 2019.It was so, so weird to see.
It became a nostalgia account for it’s own old tweets
The worst is those bot accounts that draw you in like “look at these cute dogs!” then after a few weeks you start seeing weird weight loss posts or some other scam and you’re like “what even is this account? why is ‘shibesdaily’ posting some weight loss scam?”
The account blocked me several years ago. Why I have no idea- I only ever retweeted funny stuff and expressed appreciation for the account.
Reported!
My guess is a blockchain type thing – it’s happened to me before. Not to say that there aren’t valid reasons people would block me (my politics are very strident and annoying!) but more than once I’ve been blocked by an account I couldn’t figure out and it was a deal where they’d had an issue with someone I follow or who follows me and they blocked a batch at once and I fell in that net, as others had reported the same type of issue.
that had to be it. my twitter account is clean- i dont talk politics or use profanity on it, so needless to say I was shocked when I got blocked. I’ve noticed I’m blocked by some random people I’ve never interacted with, including some famous folks! No way they went out of their way to block me individually, especially when we’ve not interacted.
Retweeting funny stuff? That’s a blockin’!
Wait, how could fan and parody accounts be shut down by a “free speech absolutist?” You aren’t saying Elon didn’t think that through, are you?
Watch out, if you sass Elon like that he’ll post a lame gif, and his nerd-army will tell you you’re pathetic. Without a hint of irony.
dril is the violinist playing as everyone shoves their way to the life boats.
dril would be a violinist from the safety of a lifeboat, though.
“Gentlemen, it was a privilege to shitpost with you tonight.”
Also the violin was cobbled together from scraps of deck chairs and random cats from below decks.
he’s playing it terribly and his entire ass is out
And yet we’re all laughing our asses off at him.
That’s one year more than there were quotable seasons of The Simpsons…
there will be regrets
OT1H, change is inevitable; things come and go. Such is life.OTOH, this is the kind of stuff that will absolutely drive Twitter into the ground. Twitter is the extent of my social media dealings and it’s basically because of the goofy jokes, memes, and yes Simpsons quotes, not for some blue check verified stuff.Can’t speak for anyone else, but when the jokes go, then I’m probably outta there, too.
lol… Twitter will be just fine.
I’m confused – This person just tweeted quotes from a show. He didn’t write these quotes, just transcribed them along with a screencap from the show. I’m wondering how it became so popular and why it’s a loss that they won’t be on twitter again?I’m sure my bitterness is showing, but I don’t feel this is worth reporting.