Jim Fallows puts quite well just what it is we have lost, with the necrosis of Twitter:
Twitter, now X or Xitter, is in hospice. No one knows how long this stage will last. Perhaps no one will ever know whether it was on purpose, through narcissistic impulse, or by sheer incompetence that Elon Musk destroyed the most valuable function that Twitter over 15 years had evolved to serve.
That role, Twitter at its best, was as a near-instant, near-global nervous system that could alert people to events anywhere. It could be an earthquake, an outbreak, an uprising, a World Cup match: through its own version of AI, the old Twitter could direct attention to the people and organizations best positioned to comment about it. That early AI-before-the-name was known as “verification,” which helped you know at a glance which updates were coming from, say, the Ukrainian government after a rocket attack, or Martina Navratilova during a Grand Slam match, or Joan Baez after a concert or protest march. And which updates were not.
https://substack.com/inbox/post/135526939
I think that’s exactly right, and it’s also why, no matter how amusing or interesting or low-level-pleasantly time-wasting Bluesky or Mastodon or Threads or etc., etc. might be, none of them is going to *replace* Twitter.
As Nilay Patel has elucidated repeatedly, the product of social media is moderation and while Twitter had, let’s just say an uneven record on this count, Fallows gets to the heart of what element of Twitter moderation actually worked: a combination of official architecture and hive-mind aggregation that could, faster than any media or technology we’ve had since or probably will have for a while, communicate what was happening.
This function, it’s worth noting, was already breaking down before Elon started guiding the ship to the bottom of the ocean – bad actors of all sorts (cynical political operatives, crypto/NFT scammers, etc.) were leveraging Twitter’s centrality in determining thing-happening-ness to spread mis- and disinformation, run grifts, and generally pollute the information space. It’s a wicked problem and maybe one that some retro-future version of Twitter management could have handled, but – alas.
None of the nascent alt-Twitters, however, are offering a model that (at present) stands a chance of recreating the Twitter-that-was – Bluesky’s velvet-rope approach of a closed beta with limited invites is inimical to scaling, and its moderation leaves something to be desired; Mastodon seems focused on being a scoldy nerd clubhouse; Threads is explicitly not going to be for news and politics, to say nothing of Meta’s, uh, uneven past with content moderation and current willingness to narc on users exercising their bodily autonomy, and help send them to prison. Threads’ rollout of a “Following” tab where you can actually see posts from people you follow (and only them) in chronological order is good – but they can’t help themselves, as there’s no way to make this permanent (it reverts to a suggested, non-chronological timeline every so often). This commitment to non-chronological sorting as a key property of the app (and the lack so far of a desktop app) makes it an impossible solution to the Twitter-shaped hole in our networks.
And there is a hole, even if you weren’t on Twitter. Getting back to Fallows’ metaphor, Twitter did indeed function as “a near-instant, near-global nervous system” that communicated to other parts of the global body. Famously, members of the media were over-represented there (for good reason! it’s where you found out about and disseminated news!) but also there were members of many communities – Black Twitter, comedians, shitposters, human rights activists, sports fans, and others – who performed the function not only of producing content on Twitter but also of connecting it to communities of interest. These niche communities had their own internal logics and discourses, and were connected with other digital networks – surfacing trends from other social media (over time, variously Tumblr, TikTok, and especially networks not dominant in the US and Western world) and also pushing content and consensuses from Twitter back over to those communities.
Importantly, the withering of Twitter does not mean that these local communities cease to exist – but they now in many cases lack a connection to mass-ness that Twitter provided. Not even necessarily Twitter itself, which topped out at about 30-something percent market share (dwarfed by Facebook and Instagram in the West, by other sites and protocols elsewhere) but in its connection to the over-posters and media members that defined its audience. Twitter was never quite a public square but it was an accelerant for discourse, and helped facilitate access to a megaphone for many groups that had never had that access or opportunity.
And most importantly, through that access and acceleration, it became, for a while, a place where you really could get more of a sense of the everything that was going on. Now: this mostly felt terrible. Twitter was the Hellsite for a reason – it’s hard to take on board all the news of the world, because so much of it is bad. But there was a moment of access and honesty to it all, a falling away of the scales from the eyes, the sense that you could for a minute see the system of the world.
Of course this wasn’t ever quite true, Twitter wasn’t real life, and so on. But it was more true, especially at moments of crisis, than has been so elsewhere – and Twitter’s lack of hard moderation made more of the uncomfortable truths bubble up. Threads very clearly doesn’t want that to happen – wants that not to happen. Mastodon wants to stick to its literal knitting. Bluesky wants all the jokes and fun of the top posters without the responsibility of mass scale. It’s not really even worth talking about the right-wing Twitter clones, who all inevitably fail because right-wing posters just want to harass and dunk on left-liberals, and don’t want to just hang out with each other. None of it quite works.
But I’m not sure we want it to work, right now, because I’m not sure there’s a coherent we that can bring together the combination of social knowledge and moderation theory, engineering expertise, capital, audience, and theory of the case. And maybe that’s fine. Google is actively and passively breaking search, money is rushing to “AI” tools that will eat the Internet, then themselves, and pollute the open Web with their excretions, Reddit is in the middle of a dramatic self-immolation, and journalism’s future looks bleak (with a few green shoots of possible futures). To say nothing of the ongoing epistemic crisis in the US and much of the rest of the world, with the underlying basis for determining truth increasingly divergent among communities.
There’s not a snappy ending here – we are kind of drifting in space. But I’ll end with a few questions, and endeavor to pursue those more in the future:
-What do you, personally, want an information ecosystem to look like? What would be good for you?
-What does a sustainable information ecosystem look like, in theory – and how does that hash or not, with the current conditions?
-What can we learn from the current bust cycle of mass social media, that can help inform whatever comes next?
More anon!
Jacob Kramer-Duffield thinks 