I only just noticed that I missed an anniversary. Last September marked my 15th year on Twitter/X. Not that I would have had a party or posted one of those “a little personal news” tweets. From the first day I’ve been on it (and someone else set up the account for me), I’ve never been sure how I felt about it.
At times it’s been fun, at times enraging (I’ve been in some pointless rows there) and at times baffling. Yet I’ve never quite got what it is for; or at least what the heavy users were getting from it. Some obviously used it for self-promotion, some seem to have found a community, usually through a shared interest, but even in the pre-Musk era, there was a large cohort who seemed to be there just to give out.
Social media in general but Twitter/X in particular seems to tap into a dark human need to be mean to other people: and not just on political subjects. Twitter users would insult others over their appearance or if a tweet had a spelling mistake or if they didn’t agree about a Marvel film. In the real world, it would be exceptional if a stranger crossed the street to tell you that your shoes are ugly. On Twitter, that could happen every day.
Since Elon Musk took over that has increased exponentially. All the previously banished loons have been let back on, populating the feed with largely US “content” with breathless titles such as REVEALED and EXPOSED: revealing and exposing how the Deep State is controlling the weather and operating mind-control machines. Musk himself is a prodigious tweeter on how Libs and Dems are destroying America. You’d wonder how he finds the time to run his businesses. You’d think Donald Trump hadn’t won the election at all.
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And more than ever, there are people on Twitter hunting for others to abuse. Yet their opportunities to so do seem to be diminishing. Since Musk bought the platform, there has been a steady decline in users: some of them, no doubt, Libs and Dems, but mostly, I suspect, people who would rather that their social media experience not consist of vitriol and screaming rows. There were reports that the writer Stephen King was kicked off for calling Elon Musk the “new first lady”. But he simply left.
The problem for these digital refugees is where to go. Some have migrated to Threads, though that can feel like a rather sad place: like a group of people who haven’t been invited to a party and are pretending not to care. Twitter is mentioned more on Threads than it is on Twitter. Before that, Mastodon was a contender and since the US election, there’s been a bit of a buzz about Bluesky.
All of them have had technical problems, and on all of them – including X itself – there’s an ongoing discussion as to what is the best social media platform to move to: one that could replicate what Twitter used to be like. None of the alternatives seem to have got that quite right. And it’s a discussion that feels underpinned with sadness; perhaps an as yet-unacknowledged admission that those days are gone for good.
That won’t stop people searching. It’s remarkable that in the past two decades our culture and our brains have been rewired to such a degree that the idea of not having a social media presence has become unthinkable for many people; that not having one would create a profound absence in their lives.
Yet what they are searching for – a place that is convivial, where people can respectfully disagree, where mob attacks don’t take place, where you can be reasonably sure that what you are reading is true – may not be possible. There doesn’t seem to be an algorithm for that yet. Or maybe there isn’t any money to be made from developing one.