It's The End Of Twitter As We Know It, And I Don't Feel Fine

 

It’s The End of Twitter as We Know It, And I Don’t Feel Fine

By Don Curren

                                                

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact day that Twitter died.

That’s partly because its death has come in fits and starts. Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, chaos has reigned; he’s announced some dumb things and not followed through, announced others and followed through with a vengeance.

But it’s also partly because the social-media platform lives on as a zombie version of its former self. It bears a new name – a highly appropriate one - and a grim and unappealing new logo. In other ways, it's deceptively similar.

Since everyone’s interaction with a given medium is different, the exact moment it died and turned into “ZT” (or “Zombie Twitter,” as I refer to it) is different for everyone.

For some, it doesn’t seem to have happened yet. It surprises me how many people still use it heavily despite its current zombie status.

It also surprises me who continues to use it: some of the nicest-seeming people I ever encountered on Twitter are still investing a lot of time and energy into ZT.

I continue to use it as my second-string social media platform, a place to repeat things I initially post elsewhere, retweet interesting things I stumble on when sporadically visiting it, and occasionally engage in a bit of conversation.

After experimenting with Threads, PostNews and CounterSocial (which no one else seems to have even heard of) I’ve settled, somewhat uneasily, on BlueSky as my primary social-media venue.

It’s the one that, so far, is most reminiscent of what initially drew me to Twitter.

I was a reluctant Tweeter, at first; the idea of writing in such a constrained and ephemeral format seemed distinctly unappealing.

Working as a journalist at the time, I was constantly chaffing at the limits imposed on my writing. When 500 words felt too constrained, 140 characters seemed like a no-go zone.

But in the early 2010s, being on social media was seeming like an occupational requirement for journalists. So, I began to experiment with Twitter.

And I gradually discovered that it offered much more than a medium for “micro-blogging.”

Beyond the obvious benefits of drawing attention to my stories and those of my colleagues, making contacts and engaging with them, it quickly proved to be a realm of discovery, a way of finding interesting people and links to articles and information across the spectrum of my interests, both personal and professional. (Who knew there were so many Iris Murdoch fans out there?)

It was kind of extraordinary – an infrastructure for rapidly creating communities of interest, and even a kind of friendship, and an access point to an extremely broad range of up-to-the-minute information.

It ultimately became a core part of my working life. The longer I was there, and the more I tweeted, the more rewarding it became.

Of course, there were downsides: for every like-minded person on twitter, there were dozens of unlike-minded ones, and many were rude, obnoxious, and aggressively ignorant.

But curating your feed carefully, engaging in judicious blocking and muting, and refusing to engage in pointless arguments could shield you from a lot of the more annoying aspects of the platform.

So, when Musk first took over and started to tinker with Twitter, I wasn’t terribly worried.

I’ve always had concerns about Musk and the values he embodies, but as a journalist I’d often worked for owners whose values and ideologies I’d disagreed with.

That alone wasn’t enough to drive me off the site.

As Musk gradually began to make his mark on Twitter, people whom I liked and respected began to leave. And as Musk fired large swathes of Twitter’s staff, its functionality started to be impaired in various ways.

The small but lively community I expected to find at the top of my feed every morning began to disintegrate, and many of the interesting people I’d met and cultivated from around the world stopped showing up.

Junky ads for cryptocurrency investments, and phishing phembots gradually supplanted the kind of information and contacts that attracted me to Twitter in the first place.

That thing that really began to undermine its usefulness to me was when it reduced the visibility of non “verified” accounts such as myself.

(No, there’s no way I’m going to pay the world’s richest man $8 a month for the privilege of supplying him with free content.)

I found engagement dropping sharply. Impressions slipped from 400 or more to 100 or less, and responses of any kind dropped even more precipitously.

The cost/benefit analysis on any given tweet tilted from, “yes, it’s worth a minute or five” to “no, I can find something better to do with my time.”

When I found myself getting more traction on BlueSky, with a twentieth of the followers, that was, as they say, the “tipping point.”

My partial departure from ZT is admittedly more pragmatic than principled, as were the departures of many who spotted Musk’s problematic aspects in the early days and left immediately.

Musk’s increasingly odious behavior online has, however, strengthened the principles side of the equation, as well. Both principles and pragmatism now align to argue strongly for backing away from Zombie Twitter.

Why stay on ZT at all now that it’s both dysfunctional and ethically repugnant?

Admittedly, it’s partly inertia. Like the zombies who kept returning to the mall every day in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, tweeting was such a deeply engrained part of my routine I kept it up the site was gradually zombified.

It was also because, in its earlier days, the decline of Twitter was highly entertaining.

Twitter attracted a lot of clever, witty, incisive people. As a result, the reaction to Musk’s inept moves was usually entertaining enough to justify hanging around even as his actions degraded the overall quality of the site. Remember the early days of paid “verification” or the “rate limit” weekend?

The amusement factor has declined sharply, though, and has been eclipsed by the repulsiveness of Musk’s cozying up to antisemites and white supremacists.

Continuing to zombie-tweet is also an act of faith, an expression of the hope that some day, through some sequence of events involving Musk selling it off or somehow losing control, things will get better.

They probably won’t. Musk seems determined to reshape it into two (hopefully) incompatible things: a vehicle for his toxic worldview, and a profitable corporation. However that ends up, it’s not likely to be pretty.

The road there might prove entertaining, but the final destination, the destruction of Twitter or its decline into a completely grotesque variant of its former self, will be kind of tragic.

In the process, hundreds, maybe thousands of vibrant, virtual communities will be destroyed.

Twitter was never a “digital town square.” Town squares are publicly owned. Twitter never has been.

But there was a time when it was a place where interesting and productive exchanges could happen.

Private owners are inevitably going to exert control over the content posted on their platform.

They can do it badly, without concern for trust and safety, or they can to it conscientiously. They can do it heavy-handedly, or they can to with a light touch.

Pre-Musk Twitter did have faults, but it managed to combine some regard for trust and safety with a relatively light-touch approach to content moderation.

That created the kind of environment that drew me to Twitter, and helped make it a vibrant, diverse, interesting place to be.

However well-intentioned the many sites now vying to replace Twitter may be, at present they aren’t remotely as engaging as it was in its heyday.

It’s not their fault – it’s just that they’re starting from scratch, or somewhere near it. They don’t benefit in the same way that Twitter did from the commitment and effort of millions of interesting people.

But now Zombie Twitter doesn’t benefit from those either. It’s driven most of those people away and replaced them with a large “basket of deplorables,” some of whom Musk is reportedly remunerating quite well for their ability to trigger reactions regardless of the veracity of their posts.

Twitter was once a world unto itself, and a world worth tarrying in.

But now that particular online world has been corrupted, and as there aren’t really comparable replacements, I find I can’t echo Michael Stipe and claim that I feel fine as is ends.

I don’t.

I fell like something unique, valuable, and possibly irreplaceable has been lost.

I often find myself reading pieces these days that examine the state of something – trend, institution, market, company or what have you - and conclude the problem really isn’t with the phenomenon under question.

The problem, it’s often concluded, is with the late capitalist context it’s operating in.

That seems to be case with Twitter. And, given the troubled state of other major social-media platforms, “enshittification,” as the writer and activist Cory Doctorow puts it, seems inevitable for those in the privately held domain. (Wikipedia: “Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets. Enshittification can be seen as a form of rent-seeking.”)

Is the solution finding some way of establishing a Twitter-like platform that’s outside the domain of private capital in the way advocated by post-capitalist theorists like Paul Mason and Jeremy Rifkin?

That, as they say, is beyond my pay grade.

In the meantime, you can find me on BlueSky, at @dbcurren.bsky.social.

Until the enshittification starts there, at least, and we have to do this whole thing all over again …