Elon Musk laughs as Twitter burns, editorial illustration by Rob Salkowitz.
Since Elon Musk’s ultimatum to Twitter employees to “go extremely hardcore” or quit ended in a visible devastation of the site’s remaining workforce Thursday night, Twitter
TWTR
The prevailing sentiment among power users is that Twitter may have been hell, but it was OUR hell, and its seemingly inevitable collapse will leave a huge hole in the lives of information users everywhere.
All of this may be true, but it’s not even part of the bigger story. Twitter’s detractors are quick to point out that it is a relatively small part of the social media ecosystem, dwarfed by titanic content-oriented competitors like TikTok, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, and Alphabet’s YouTube. However, Twitter has never been about depth of content. Instead, it provides immediacy and simultaneity across the entire information space. Think of it as a fly’s wide-angle, multi-plane eyes, optimized to detect movement in the periphery and enable instant reaction.
Last week ComScore CMO Tania Yuki explained how this allowed brands and commercial Twitter customers to instantly spot and jump into new conversations as they happen, so they can authentically engage with their customers around important issues at the moment. This dynamic is at the heart of Twitter’s business value proposition.
It only works that way for brands, because that’s how it works for everything else. Some users come to Twitter to talk, but many others come to find out what people are talking about. Eventually it became indispensable to all kinds of communities seeking the kind of strategic view of a situation that comes only from a collection of individual impressions, and to understand complex and fast-moving situations such as natural disasters, political upheavals, economic trends, and more. a lot.
Once the platform took off, it became a unique window into the global subconscious. The resulting data stream was unique and invaluable for mapping the intricate relationships between invisible communities, content consumption, influence patterns, and modes of engagement.
Those who knew what to do with that data could use it to achieve important business objectives. Of course, the more you know about an audience, the more relevant and targeted you can make your content, making it more likely that those people will take whatever action you’re trying to encourage.
Sometimes people didn’t even need access to advanced data and analytics to figure out how to take advantage of it. Twitter rewarded individual users with an innate understanding of how to communicate and engage, and gave them instant and low-cost access to a global stage. One of those users ended up being President of the United States for a time. Another built a fortune large enough to buy Twitter and then broke it like a 4-year-old with a toy on Christmas morning.
But others built platforms for themselves and their ideas that they could not have achieved by any other means. Any publisher, artist, filmmaker or creator of any kind who used Twitter to spread the word about their activities will be sorely missed and will likely experience a huge and immediate drop in reach and revenue if the platform goes down.
Twitter’s power has come with abuses, including the ability to destroy strangers’ lives with the speed and suddenness of a drone strike, to stoke fear and mobilize destabilizing mass movements rooted in half-baked ideas, clever memes and the illusion of empowerment. . If Twitter is down, those parts of it won’t be missing.
Successor platforms may be able to replicate or surpass Twitter’s functionality, but they won’t approach its true value for a long, long time, if ever. Twitter wasn’t about any individual group of conversations or relationships, as important as they might have been to its most dedicated users. It was about the sum total of all those conversations happening everywhere, all the time, all at once.
We can switch to Mastodon (where, by the way, you can find me @[email protected]) or Discord servers or other places to maintain our personal and professional networks. However, under the project, these remain closed villages and communities. We may enjoy the benefits of the neighborhood, but we will miss the comforts of the big city—above all, the ability to look out the window from commanding heights and witness the entirety of all the chaos, hustle, dynamism, and activity in one view. alone.
