TechCrunch staff on what we lose if we lose Twitter

I spied a tweet the other day that journalists would suffer if Twitter ever shut down because they would lose a driver of traffic. While there is some truth to that — Twitter does help expose your writing to a larger audience — it’s also true that Twitter has value beyond that for journalists and other users.

It’s safe to say that Twitter is in disarray as Elon Musk fecklessly tries to grasp the business, instituting mass layoffs as the remaining essential employees flee the general chaos, spurred on by midnight email ultimatums.

That most recent missive, it seems, triggered a mass resignation, according to reports. When you add that to the people who were let go in the layoffs, it’s fair to ask how many people are left to run the site.

Even before all this happened, the TechCrunch team had a conversation on Slack about what we would miss if Twitter went away tomorrow. At the time (three days ago), it felt more like a whimsical game than a real possibility.

For all its warts, Twitter has a way of connecting people who otherwise might never connect. It gives us a place to share our passions, our random thoughts, and yes, our shitposts, all while keeping us up on what’s happening in the world in real time.

While there are surely many negatives to the platform — it’s way too easy to spread misinformation and hate speech and attack people you disagree with — there are also loads of positives, and many things we would miss if Twitter perishes.

It now feels like it very well could.

So several TechCrunch staffers contributed what they would miss most if Twitter went away (while hoping it’ll still be up tomorrow):

Dominic-Madori Davis: Black Twitter, obviously

I’m not even sure where to begin to describe the immense impact Black Twitter has had on, well, the world, really. From when I was a teenager, watching so many Black people mobilize to bring awareness to the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, to that time we all shared experiences and made jokes as to what it was like having Thanksgiving with a Black family. “When it’s time to leave and the plate you hid is missing, *insert Kermit screaming meme here.*”

The memes are endless, as is the support — and the heat — we give and place onto people and topics. It was a place to find community in a world so unkind to us. It really does feel like its own universe sometimes. I remember a few years ago going to Clubhouse to hear the talks and then running to Twitter to watch everyone live-tweet the conversations.

This thread from a few days ago really brought back memories, in which author Kira J hosted a little “Black Jeopardy.” Famous dates for 500, please. “On December 21st, 2020, what were Black people waiting around to get?” Superpowers. And they’re coming still, don’t worry. They’re just running on CP time.

The community always felt quite insular; what happened there rarely burst out of our bubble. When it does hit the mainstream, everything shifts, everything changes. Like someone walking in on you mid-shower. Non-Black people often don’t understand the humor, the sarcasm, the “wait, did we all have the same childhood?” I’m always reminded of some tweet awhile ago asking, “How does one get into Black Twitter?” It’s not quite the same or as easy as people just giving invites to the cookout (stop just giving those out, please!!!).

I often wonder what it is like to not be in Black Twitter.

What do people think when they come across a photo of Chris Evans wearing long neon yellow acrylics with a honey mustard-colored satin bonnet? Where do other people get their news, if not from Philip Lewis? I’ll miss seeing something trending and saying yep, that’s Black Twitter, it has to be. I would miss the solidarity, the camaraderie often not easily made or reciprocated out in the physical world. Yes, I think I would even miss Roc Nation Brunch Twitter, also known as LLC Twitter, also known as the people who tell everyone to start a business and become entrepreneurs. “Would you rather take $500,000 or dinner with Jay-Z?” Seriously, just take the money and run.

Last week, Brooklyn White-Grier, the features editor at Essence, asked everyone what we were going to wear to Twitter’s homegoing service. Someone made programs, started planning gospel music performances, and, of course, we started picking out our hats. I tweeted that I was excited to get an extra low vibrational plate at the repast and would probably show up with slicked-back baby edges and in Valentino couture, as Zendaya did to the Emmys.

It’s hard to imagine anything could replace Black Twitter. But if history has taught us anything, it’s that we’ll always find our way.

Ron Miller: Spontaneity and connection

I have been on this platform since 2008, before people really knew how to use it or even what it was. I saw it grow from a naive set of early users with lots of camaraderie, where people shared what they ate for lunch because they didn’t know what else to talk about.

It grew into a place to have spirited debates and discussions, a town square on the internet. But over time — slowly at first, and then very quickly — the level of discourse began to deteriorate. First came the marketers, then came the haters, and before you knew it, the platform had transformed into something else entirely.

But even for all that negativity, Twitter at its best has been a place to have discussions and to connect with people you probably would never have met otherwise; people who, when you met them in real life, you felt like you knew already them — because, in a sense, you did.

The platform’s best trait is its sense of immediacy, getting to news before even the mainstream news outlets have it — hearing the rumors and stories from the tech world, politics and sports first, as they happen. It’s an online service where you can learn about books, movies, baseball trade rumors and lawsuits all in one place, often things you might not have heard otherwise, and certainly not as fast.

Being able to connect with people in the moment, whether it was the latest episode of a favorite TV show, a sports playoff game or Twitter melting down, has real value. Getting those insights from people you would never talk to otherwise is amazingly powerful, and if it went away tomorrow, I would truly miss it.

I’ve been messing around with other platforms and other ways of getting news over the last couple of weeks as Twitter’s list of problems grew, and I’ve yet to find anything that comes close to it. It’s partly a scale issue because so many people are on the platform. I can follow people who I know are tuned into my beat and my interests, and I can find information and connections much faster.

While we all were complaining about Twitter, even long before Elon Musk became owner, if it were gone tomorrow, there is nothing that can replace it. In spite of the very real problems — and the cesspool it has often turned into over time — I would miss the good parts, the spontaneity and the connections, I’ve found there.

Amanda Silberling: A platform where text comes first

We can’t seriously go back to Tumblr. It is 2022. We are not teenagers anymore.

Twitter is really the only social network where you can just post into the void and it’s socially acceptable. You don’t have to write a long blog post like a Substack, or chat in specific segments of the platform like Reddit or Discord. You can post esoteric, almost dadaist takes on your daily life, then minutes later, share a nuanced, reported article you’ve been working on for weeks.

This is true to how I live my life: I alternate between writing sincerely about how technology impacts us, and then I retweet a stupid shitpost about how John Fetterman should be allowed to wear basketball shorts and a hoodie on the Senate floor (for the record, yes).

My Twitter presence is the most complete encapsulation of who I am on the internet: Work is a big part of my life, but so is screaming about my favorite band getting nominated for a Grammy, or being bullied by my IRL friends to post a Notes App Apology for forgetting to bring my Pokéball popcorn maker to our festive viewing of “Jennifer’s Body.” Who are we kidding? Are we actually our fullest selves on LinkedIn, a platform I only post articles on in hopes of generating more traffic for techcrunch dot com? Or what about Facebook, where I don’t even use my real name anymore because bad actors could use my profile to find out where my grandma lives?

Twitter is not perfect. I have wasted countless hours on unproductive doom scrolling and have received innumerable messages threatening me over the things I write on this very website. But it’s not a “highlight reel” like Instagram, and it doesn’t require you to film yourself — your real human face! — for TikTok.

So many bizarre text-based memes were born on Twitter ( … or sometimes they’re Tumblr memes that get ported over to Twitter, but as we said before, it’s 2022. I am 26. I cannot seriously be on Tumblr again!).

Nathan Allebach, the man who is probably responsible for making brands sentient (and horny), posted a document recently that belongs in the Library of Alexandria: a 105-page doc that attempts to chronicle as many Twitter-borne text memes as possible. It’s beautiful. It is art. It is content that would never work on Instagram or TikTok.

On my podcast — shameless plug — I recently spoke with Alex Cohen, originator of the #RatVerified meme, whom I initially met through “weird Facebook” in 2015. Seven years later, in a time when none of us really use Facebook anymore, we reminisced about why that time of being Extremely Online felt so special. Instead of posting on Twitter — which wasn’t popular in my circles at the time — we posted our daily thoughts in private meme groups like Post Aesthetics, a strange, mostly leftist, mostly Ivy-League-student Facebook group. It was like tweeting, except we were tweeting to a very specific community.

Somehow, the decline of Twitter has made me nostalgic for Weird Facebook. And I’m pissed off at Elon Musk for making me feel fondly about anything that Mark Zuckerberg has created. But what can I say. I really want a place to post sentence-long shitposts with no punctuation, and I don’t know where I would go if I couldn’t do that on Twitter anymore.

Christine Hall: Camaraderie

I admit that I wasn’t using Twitter correctly until a few years ago. I joined back in 2009 and dreaded every moment of it. I was also in charge of social media content for the newspaper where I worked and didn’t know how to do that all day and also create content for my own account. So my account largely went unused, and in fact, I’ve posted just under 9,000 times in 13 years, which averages out to about twice a day.

Fast forward to now, and I am on Twitter every day, monitoring what’s going on. Twitter is not only a place where I can find viewpoints of all kinds of topics I am writing about — I feel a sense of camaraderie, especially within certain aspects of the tech journalism and venture capital ecosystems. It doesn’t matter that tech journalists go after the same story — we retweet and repost each other’s work.

People DM me every day to ask if I am interested in a story or to tell me about themselves. If Twitter goes away tomorrow, I share the same view as my colleagues here that there is no place like it, and I won’t know where to go to feel that kind of camaraderie again. I know people because I “met” them on Twitter.

Don’t make me go to LinkedIn. It doesn’t understand my humor.

Paul Sawers: Tracking news (and customer service)

I’ve gradually weaned myself off social media over the past five or six years, either deleting accounts or removing apps from my phone so that I’m not constantly checking what’s happening in the world. I’m much happier for it.

Twitter is no different, as I only ever use it on my laptop these days. But for all its flaws, it has remained an essential tool for me across two very different use cases.

As just about any journalist will testify, it’s difficult keeping tabs on big events without being plugged into Twitter. TweetDeck, specifically, plays such an important part in my professional life. Multiple columns, all carefully tailored to monitor what specific people and companies are saying on specific themes and topics. Plus, the ability to set up keyword alerts that ping on my desktop whenever something that I half-expected was going to happen, happens, is priceless.

Away from my day job, Twitter is also incredibly useful for interacting with companies. This, in my view, is something that Twitter could have done a lot more with from a commercial perspective: Twitter is brilliant as a customer service conduit. Email has its place, but it’s easy for companies to ignore emails, which is why Twitter is so good for getting companies to fix whatever thing it was they messed up. Wronged customers can collaborate around shared bad experiences, and companies have to do something about it before conversations snowball across the public domain.

On top of that, the ability to slide from public conversations into private DMs is incredibly useful for discussing the details of a specific issue.

But on the flip side, too many people use Twitter as a platform for being nasty to others, including customer service representatives, who are usually doing their best to help. This is one side of Twitter I won’t miss if it dies tomorrow.

Despite all the hullabaloo about Mastodon or whatever other pretender people want to put on a pedestal, nothing will be able to replace Twitter. I don’t mean that in a nostalgic or emotional sense, I mean it quite literally — Twitter got to where it is today organically, through being in the right place at the right time as smartphones proliferated among digital natives and noobs alike. Consumers, celebrities, companies, politicians, journalists, students, activists, meme-makers and everyone in between all signed up to Twitter to make it the “global town square” cliché it is today.

Similar to how getting people to fully ditch WhatsApp for Signal is a largely fruitless endeavor at any meaningful scale, if Twitter were to die tomorrow, sure, some people would sign up for an alternative and try to make it a “thing,” but it can never really achieve what Twitter achieved. Not without creating a huge fragmented mess of people spread across different platforms.

Natasha Mascarenhas: Eavesdropping

I’m nosy, curious and have a constant fear that I’m missing key comprehension or a hidden angle on a macroeconomic trend. It’s probably why I’m a reporter (and why I’m addicted to Twitter).

Twitter lets me be an eavesdropping, unassuming fly on the wall. That was important when I first re-downloaded it in college and subscribed to get a notification every single time Boston Business Journal tweeted news — and it’s important now as I try to understand what founders think in real time (versus what they want to tell a TechCrunch reporter over Zoom). It helped me get up to speed when I was an intern at the Boston Globe, and it helps me blend in and understand more as a senior reporter at TechCrunch.

Eavesdropping became even more important to me about one week into the pandemic, which happened to be one week into my job at TechCrunch. It became how I found my sources, showing up in the embeds of my stories. It also became how I balanced out my sources, aiming to not just quote the people with the spiciest takes in 180 characters. As an early-career reporter, I feel like Twitter gave me a fighting chance at catching up to all my brilliant colleagues and competitors digesting the news in real time. I mean, I literally saw their thought process every single day.

We all heard that Twitter became our town square during quarantine, but for me, it also became a map that steers me into important topics and simultaneously lets me know how other people agree or disagree with the directions on display.

Twitter is weird because it treats content like it was born to be public and amplified, but somehow gives some of us the semblance that it’s OK to be the rawest versions of ourselves. As a reporter, I want all of that — the sappy, the unsavory and the straight-up silly.

As my colleague Christine said above, don’t make me go to LinkedIn. I don’t need to eavesdrop on your job moves or conference gigs — I need to eavesdrop on what you had for lunch yesterday!

Ivan Mehta: Watching the world fall apart together

They said the world was ending in 2012, and folks on Twitter have been waiting for it ever since. Everything is a crisis, and everyone feels tired. Netflix airs a ton of bad reality shows, but nothing is as addictive as Twitter.

As Amanda said, it’s the perfect place to shitpost and get appreciated for it. Where else can I get appreciated for a shitpost about my cat? I am not motivated enough to post on LinkedIn or make videos for Instagram Reels. I can only gather the courage to tweet a shitty pun.

I appreciate Twitter for its pace. I can see tech Twitter melt down while someone else tweets cat pictures and sports controversies. It’s like a midnight craving: You would open your fridge every 15 minutes despite knowing nothing has changed.

Twitter is also the central complaints board for the world. Instagram is down? Come to Twitter. New Porcupine Tree album is average at best? Come to Twitter. Hate eating mint chocolate? Come to Twitter. But what if Twitter goes down? Where will you whine? In front of friends who are around you? So web0 of you.

It is also a good place to verify if something shitty is REALLY happening. New Delhi experienced earthquake tremors two times in the last two weeks. First one was at 2 a.m., and I wasn’t sure if it was an earthquake or I was just groggy — many people posting on Twitter confirmed it for me.

Most of the time, the Twitter timeline is utter chaos and insanity, but we probably need that for greater sanity.

Alex Wilhelm: The ability to be myself, in a medium that I prefer, whenever I want

Given my caboose status here, I’m deliberately not reading the above entries before I add my own pennies to the conversation. There’s nothing more honoring of Twitter than commenting without reading the article, right?

To work: Twitter is not a social network. It’s social media to a degree in that some media is shared in a social capacity on its feeds, but that phrase falls short of what makes Twitter truly unique. No, Twitter was the place I called home — call, for now — for more than a decade because it was a place where my being myself was accepted, and at times even modestly successful.

As a person who prefers writing to speaking, and would rather read than listen, and wants to to engage in communication on my own terms and timing, Twitter still feels like it was built just for me.

I can’t imagine a better place for folks like myself — we, the sporadically loud introverts of the world — than Twitter. Even if the business model isn’t very good, the product was so uniquely perfect that I would hug it if I could. By that I mean that Twitter is bad at collecting information on users the way that Meta perfected, but it is a place where anyone can take a shot at anyone else, and often the best content is made from the least popular people, at least measured by their following. Going out on a limb, I think that the two are more connected than they are usually considered.

You can get big on Twitter in any number of ways, a winning smile not required. Hell, you don’t even have to pretend to be human on Twitter. I’ve followed accounts of all sorts, from useful bots to folks aping other species to companies trying to act human; heck, at times I’ve followed people who thought they were corporations.

Twitter’s freewheeling, text-focused, real-time communications platform has issues. Myriad, as we all know, including the fact that it’s hard to make ad incomes off of short messages that are designed to get buried quickly in the melee. That’s why you probably couldn’t build Twitter today from the ground up, because it is built so contrary to better, known ways of making money from attention online. But it did get built back before venture capital was quite as routinized, and then it got just big enough to survive on its own. Until, well, maybe, you know.

I wonder if New Twitter will be as delightful as Old Twitter. The idea that paid users will get more prominence in-service, for example, is a miserable concept. Just that change alone would fundamentally tilt the platform away from a democratic free-for-all to a two-tier caste-based system. Yuck. Sure, it might make more money on paper, but magic is fragile, and must be protected. It breaks my heart that Twitter’s new owner doesn’t seem to understand that the social service is special not because he is popular on it, but because anyone can be. On their own terms.

No matter what happens, I’ll be the last Twitter user on the Titanic. Ladies, gentlemen, and our non-binary and gender-fluid comrades, it has been a pleasure. 🫡