Watching Twitter

As a sometimes Twitter user, I’ve been rubbernecking its implosion. I’ve been on Twitter for about 13 years, but never as a super-user. I share stuff from my blogs there, I retweet random things that tickle or resonate with me, and on rare occasions, I tweet a pure, original tweet. Mostly I use Twitter for scrolling when I have a couple of minutes here or there: I use it for a quick laugh or to find creators that make me feel good. In the Covid times, I curated my feed to replace rage-inducing content with soul-affirming paintings, clever literary accounts, and dumb (and smart) jokes.

Every day a news story comes out about the chaos at Twitter under Elon Musk, and every day I wonder, when will the chaos behind the scenes affect my experience as a user? In the first days of Musk’s new ownership, when he fired half of Twitter’s employees, drastically reduced content moderation resources while also re-platforming thousands of hate-speech spewing accounts, and nullified the verification checkmarks by removing the actual verification process, my feed tolled Twitter’s death knell. For a week, my feed was a steady stream of tweets about the end days of Twitter.

And then, Twitter didn’t disappear, and people moved on from the topic of its impending doom, and a month after Musk’s takeover, my Twitter feed is still there, and Twitter is still there, and it’s not dead yet. And at first I thought, well, I keep hearing about the turmoil, and I know that internally Twitter is utter chaos, but there’s my feed, still filling with tweets. I haven’t personally had any technical problems, but as per the first paragraph, I barely interact with Twitter other than to scroll.

But I’ve started to notice that my feed is different now. Despite following hundreds of accounts, I see tweets from a couple dozen. My feed used to be diverse, with all sorts of random stuff from lots of different kinds of sources: individuals, magazines, artists, journalists, local folks, friends, comedians. A lot of the accounts I used to enjoy don’t show up anymore. I imagine a lot of folks have left. I spot checked a couple of accounts that used to be in my feed every day, and I see that they’re still Tweeting, they’re just not being served to me. I also see a lot more ads. I don’t like ads.

Yesterday I thought, hmm. My feed isn’t as interesting as it used to be; it’s kind of ho-hum now. Not really that compelling.

And this is how the internal chaos is finally affecting me as an end user. I find myself seeking something else to scroll in my couple of minutes here and there. I liked Twitter because it was clever; I appreciated the craftsmanship required to pack a big punch into a small package. Instagram is okay for shallow scrolling and pretty pictures and to see what people are up to, but it doesn’t scratch the itch for depth, or thought, or smart humor. I go to the WordPress Reader more now than I used to, and I go to Tumblr more now as well. WordPress satisfies my depth and thought needs, and Tumblr offers art and depth and clever humor. It might be time to move away from Twitter and start curating my other feeds.