Reflections on the life (and death?) of Twitter
Reflections on the life (and death?) of Twitter
I was cracking jokes last week about Mastodon. Now, uh, find me on Mastodon?
I’ve had this Jimmy Kimmel tweet in my head for more than a decade.
Per this report from my colleagues at The Washington Post, we might finally get an answer: The end of Twitter seems near.1 Staff are quitting in droves, the service is teetering on the brink, and new owner Elon Musk is trying to patch the holes that he poked himself.
A week ago, I was cracking jokes about users bailing out of Twitter for Mastodon. Now, uh, … find me on Mastodon?
Twitter has been a habit — if not addiction — for a lot of us in the news media. Many reporters joined after this seminal 2010 column from the New York Times' David Carr, where he argued that the service would endure because it would become the latest piece of Internet plumbing: you couldn’t live without it.
The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis has quipped on his podcast that it’s our assignment desk; editors see a competitor’s story trending on Twitter, and turn around to tell their own reporters to get on it.
And as a journalist, Carr was right: Twitter has been absolutely essential. You can follow newsmakers, find sources for articles and keep up with rivals’ reporting. You can get tweets like Kimmel’s stuck in your head.
For me, Twitter was a path to become a journalist, though that wasn’t the plan when I signed up in July 2008 — the 15,499,593rd registered user, according to the site’s stats.2 All I knew was that a sports blog expert I met in a California coffee shop said that it was the hot site that all his sports blog buddies were using. (As a wannabe sports blogger at the time, this was a very effective selling point.) And a few years later, tweets I wrote helped lead to gigs contributing to Forbes and Vox on policy coverage, then a full-time job at Politico.
I even became such a Twitter fiend that I worked with economist Austin Frakt in 2012 to reveal a problem in Twitter’s programming. That episode led to a flurry of tweets from famous people and a bit of news coverage, which I remember thinking would be the biggest thing that would ever happen to me on Twitter or anywhere else.
Twitter could involve a lot of self-promotion, especially if you’re a reporter. (Which I would argue is the gig: you want people to read your articles and scoops.) But the best part, for me, was the sense of discovery and connection, especially in the early years. You could stumble into Adrianna McIntyre, whose brilliant Medicaid tweets as a recent college grad helped put her on the health policy map, a decade before she became a Harvard professor. You could become the unwitting subject of @darth’s latest wonderful photoshop. You could randomly follow this guy, who I don’t know, have never met, and yet I regularly check his tweets because they consistently make me laugh.
I’m sure a lot of folks have similar stories of making personal friends, building professional connections and generally being entertained on Twitter. There was also a sense of slight danger — the feeling you might have from performing in public, or witnessing a comedian push the boundaries with his audience.
Twitter was the kind of place where you could sit on your couch, toss off a few jokes, and then find yourself in a real article and dread that you might be in trouble at work the next day.
I’ve always thought that Twitter worked best when you treat it like a press conference, only with 1,000 of your friends in the room listening. You want to be yourself, but just remember you’re always on the record.
Or that was old Twitter, at least. I guess I’m using past tense for a site that’s still very much with us, at least as of Nov. 19, 2022.
And Twitter has survived existential threats and leadership crises before, if not on this level. It could rebound from this moment too. There’s also no real replacement, as Roger McNamee writes. I’ve tried using Mastodon a bit, and after years of using Twitter, it’s like going to stay at your cousin’s house in a small town: just familiar enough to feel weird, and so much sleepier than your normal life. Twitter is still where the action is.
But it’s clear something has changed. A site that used to be dominated by fluffy, zany moments has curdled; instead of crowds of people helping solve “what color is this dress?,” it’s much more common to see vicious pile-ons, sometimes based on an impossible-to-parse social media snafu. There really has been an exodus of key users; I know multiple people who have lost thousands of followers this month or quit the site themselves. And behind the scenes, there’s been a transformation, as the Musk era began with firings and departures that just won’t stop.
From my colleagues at The Post:
Several critical teams essential to keeping the site functioning were cut to a single engineer or none by the departures Thursday, leaving the company partially on autopilot and likely to crash sooner or later, engineers said.
There was a moment a couple weeks ago where seemingly hundreds of Twitter staff on the verge of being fired under Musk held a live-audio session, using what’s called a Twitter Space and billing it as “Tweep Therapy.” It was about 3 AM, and the audio was open to all — I spotted Boston Mayor Michelle Wu listening too — and it was a bit of a revelation.
One former Twitter staffer told a story about giving former CEO Jack Dorsey a bar of soap at an internal town hall, suggesting Dorsey needed to wash out his mouth for saying the wrong thing in a staff email. Others shared tales of where they were during key moments in Twitter’s history, like a staffer having her Hawaii vacation being interrupted when high-profile user Chrissy Teigen quit the site. It was wild and funny and sad, and also the kind of thing that reminded me that there were lots of people who kept this ship afloat for years, plugging the leaks we passengers couldn’t see.
There’s one other moment that’s come back to me in recent days. After Austin Frakt and I spotted the Twitter glitch a decade ago, my own Twitter account started acting odd that night, and I had problems logging in. I remember saying to a friend, I wonder if Twitter engineers are mad at us and blocking me out from the site. (As my friend pointed out, I was probably just being paranoid; Twitter was pretty glitchy in those days for everybody, which was the whole point that Austin and I were trying to make.)
But I also recall thinking that night in 2012: David Carr got it wrong. This isn’t plumbing, this is a private company. You’re not guaranteed free access to water, or to your tweets.
I’d forgotten that lesson in recent years. I guess I’m grateful to Elon Musk for forcing me to learn it again.
I don’t think that a social network as popular as Twitter will “die,” unless someone decides to deliberately pull the plug. But it could steadily wither away with enough site crashes, hacks or other problems that increasingly make it difficult or unappealing to use, or lose enough revenue that it becomes unprofitable to operate. And those risks appear to have dramatically accelerated in recent weeks.
That may seem like a high number, but consider that someone like Sam Bankman-Fried — a guy who’s been in the news lately — registered the 1,110,877,798,820,777,986th Twitter account when he signed up in March 2019.