Twitter’s demise might be overstated, but we still can’t unsee what we saw in 2022.
The newly Elon Musk-owned social network could continue zombie-shuffling for months or years for all we know if Elon Musk can scrape together enough advertising revenue to pay the bills — namely, the massive interest on the $13 billion in debt that he saddled the company with in order to buy it. Twitter could also declare bankruptcy and go poof — an outcome that Musk himself has said is very much on the table, and one that’s underlined by Twitter’s recent refusal to pay for everything from office rent to toilet paper.
Either way, the chaos has painted an uncertain future for one of the world’s most prominent and long-running social networks. It’s also presented an opportunity to reevaluate how the social media landscape could radically change in light of Twitter’s very tumultuous 2022.
Taylor Hatmaker, Amanda Silberling and Haje Jan Kamps offer up their own ideas of what they’d like to see in a potential post-Twitter world:
Taylor Hatmaker: Nothing lasts forever and that’s a good thing
Amanda Silberling: It’s time to get weird
Haje Jan Kamps: Bring back the good old days
Taylor Hatmaker: Nothing lasts forever and that’s a good thing
Elon Musk’s disastrous Twitter takeover showed that it just takes one person’s bad ideas to destabilize a social network that everyone assumed was a given.
The implications of that are myriad. For one, it’s a big wake-up call for brands, creators, governments and even regular people that the time and energy you invest into a platform can evaporate at a moment’s notice. The prospect of your hard-won social media audience vanishing overnight is anywhere from kinda-a-bummer to a massive problem, depending on what you use Twitter for. For some artists and small businesses, finding somewhere else to build an audience fast will be essential for survival. It’s not great for journalists, either — Twitter is networking and job security for a lot of us who mostly use the service professionally.
There are real costs to a major social network either decaying slowly or blinking out. But it’s also an opportunity for us to reevaluate our relationships with the social apps that suck up so much of our time and attention. It might be time to build a personal website or direct followers to a newsletter. Or — hear me out — spend less time on social media and more time doing something you really care about.
It’s also worth dipping a toe into decentralized projects and open protocols like Mastodon (and possibly the forthcoming Twitter-adjacent project Bluesky) to explore alternatives beyond the walled gardens of corporate social media.
Twitter’s possible demise is also a big opportunity for a social media newcomer — or maybe even many newcomers. Big legacy social platforms have dominated the space for too long, boxing out potentially interesting new social apps (all of that anti-competitive behavior and copycatting really didn’t help either). Rather than one big Twitter replacement, maybe we’ll get five or 10 different interesting social apps that are able to attract new users and build sustainable businesses with fresh ideas rather than falling into the last decade’s worth of tech’s bad social media habits, like addictive design, intrusive privacy practices and an over reliance on advertising.
Amanda Silberling: It’s time to get weird
Here is a little art history lesson. In times of strife, artists generally respond by just completely rejecting form and starting from scratch. To use a familiar example: You know Jackson Pollock, the guy who just flung paint across canvases and now people get mad that his stuff is in museums because it looks like a third-grader made it? To be honest, I don’t care for his work, but abstract expressionism is a good example of this phenomenon -– when you’ve just lived through World War II and have lost your faith in humanity, why not just fling some paint everywhere and screw whatever you were taught before because who cares?
Basically, I think we need to turn the social internet into a Jackson Pollock action painting and just wreak havoc and make everything a nonsensical mess (but we can keep content moderation; that is a good thing).
I want an internet where I constantly see things like this from a Tumblr user who is investigating a possibly nonexistent soy sauce empress named Blanche Appleton. I don’t want short-form video where I have to show people my face. I want weird text-based shitposting where it’s normal to be anonymous and people are nice to each other because they aren’t assholes.
I admit that’s a bit … unrealistically romantic. We’re just running into the same problems over and over again. We want the freedom of anonymity on the internet, but sometimes, taking steps like asking users to verify their phone number is our best defense against spam. We want to shitpost and just have fun connecting with random people around the world, but then there’s the “connecting with random people around the world” of it all.
I’m just tired and don’t want to rebuild. I don’t want to start all over again on Mastodon when Twitter is so much more user-friendly and I already have an audience there, but I also don’t want to waste away on a hell site run by a guy who tweets that his pronouns are “Prosecute/Fauci.”
We could just go back to Club Penguin, but capitalism ruined that for us, just like it ruined Twitter.
Haje Jan Kamps: Bring back the good old days
I’m willing to admit that “the good old days” are tainted by the fact that the early days of the internet were a bastion of (mostly white, mostly male) privilege. But hear me out: The early days of “social” to me, were bulletin board systems (BBS), internet relay chat (IRC) and memorizing the Mirabilis ICQ numbers of your friends.
There was something deeply beautiful about logging on to the internet and humming along to the horrendous screech of the modem connecting to the internet. Once the modem had sung its incantations, a little green dot would appear next to your friends who were also online, enabling you to chat with them directly. Instead of communicating with someone specific, it was a game of, “Hey I wonder who is out there?” — the equivalent of walking into a bar and seeing if any of your friends were there. If there were none, you had a choice: Walk out or make new friends.
Of course, always-on internet connections (and later, always-on supercomputers in our pockets) ruined this, but I would enthusiastically celebrate a return of the random, the coincidental and the whimsy of the early days of the internet. I wonder if a social network that limited you to 30 minutes per day would make sense. Or perhaps a more ephemeral type of media, where you can only see posts made when you were online at the same time.
One thing I know for sure: Whatever social media happiness looks like, it is the opposite of TikTok, reels and stories; that’s not the path to human connection. Forgive my embitterment, I suppose; I’ve grown to associate all the social media with doomscrolling and watching my life tick away in exchange for tiny bumps of dopamine. I don’t want to live that way in 2023.
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