I’ll never forgive Musk for ruining Twitter…
Nothing is perfect. But Twitter was the best social media platform of them all.
Reddit may be the pulse of the Internet. But Twitter was the world’s central nervous system. If something was happening in the world, you went to Twitter first because you knew there was someone on the ground, in the moment, posting a first-hand account of the situation.
Never before had there been a company whose logo displayed, not in a commercial, but in the news programming content, multiple times every day, in every scheduled news show.
Credible people stopped posting on Twitter. So news reporters stopped showing tweets on their shows.
Twitter never had to advertise because its posts with the logo were already everywhere your eyes looked on a TV or computer screen.
Twitter was for writers. I always suspected that the reason Journalists flocked to Twitter was its 144-character limit. It was a daily exercise to write concisely with extreme economy. You could not waste a single character. I loved it for that.
It forced you to distill your writing down to the exact point you wanted to make. Many times, after running out of characters, I stopped to ask myself, “What am I trying to say here?”
I don’t even know what it is today because I left it when Musk bought it. It’s impossible to reconstitute it because the network effect’s inertia is lost. More importantly, the decentralized social media movement is growing.
The way forward for a healthier society is decentralized social media, and I’m glad to see the EFF drop X.