I’m trying to avoid focusing overmuch on the drama over at Twitter, but it’s exceedingly difficult. It’s too much! What follows are some thoughts I’ve had during discussions with friends over the last few days.
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When I say “Twitter is dying,” I’m talking about a difficult-to-define inflection point. I mean, myspace.com still exists. digg.com still exists. slashdot.org still exists. It’s not a question of whether or not the website will still exist, or still carry ads, but of whether it will occupy the same place in the mindset of the vast majority of people. I think it’s clear that it will not.
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The idea that “something” will replace Twitter seems misguided. People talk as if facebook replaced myspace which replaced friendster, as if those transitions weren’t incomplete and messy. Some people never left, other people went elsewhere, and each of those has had more users than the previous, so they didn’t “migrate” from anywhere. Assuming Twitter survives in some form, some people will continue to be there, and probably elsewhere also.
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Social media has already become far more balkanized than it once was, and the idea of everybody belonging to a single social network seems quaint to me. I haven’t had a Facebook account in years, and many young people never have. One of my kids has a Snapchat snapscore under 1000, while another has a snapscore of more than 100k. One frequently sends TikTok links to a family iMessage thread that others have to then describe for the sibling who refuses to click on any TikTok links. My family uses iMessage threads primarily, while my spouse’s family primarily uses WhatsApp. I use Telegram to talk to my friends in Ukraine, and WeChat to keep track of my friends in China. It is probable that no one thing will replace Twitter, but that many people will spend more time on YouTube or Discord or TikTok or Instagram or something else, or several somethings else, while others start to spend time on a mastodon server or similar. Even my once Facebook-addicted mother spends more time on YouTube than anywhere else these days. It’s not always a mass migration all at once.
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But in this case, it sure seems to look like one. Mastodon servers have collectively grown by quite a lot in the last few weeks, despite putting their worst foot forward, so to speak. The onboarding is the single worst aspect of the mastodon user experience, and it’s the first thing people encounter. The fact that any of us make it though is remarkable, and the fact that more than 500k have in the last week is staggering. If you can read this post, but haven’t yet joined the bewildering service that is mastodon, you’re welcome to join me here. https://qoto.org/invite/H4qMWSGv
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Then again, Twitter has almost 400 million users, half of whom use the site on any given day, so mastodon’s 7 million isn’t putting a lot of pressure on Twitter in absolute terms. The site I pulled that stat from also says that “Twitter has 8.85% of the world’s overall social media user base,” suggesting the balkanization might already be farther along than I realized. https://backlinko.com/twitter-users
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It was easy for me to forget what an engineering marvel Twitter is. The “fail whale” of the days of Ruby are long gone, and Twitter is supporting unparalleled levels of traffic even now. If every single employee walked off the job, leaving only its new owner standing in the lobby looking for people to pose for photos with, I’m not sure how many developers would feel comfortable with their ablity to come in and keep things humming at scale, and have the skills to back up their comfort level. And that’s just to keep it running, not create “Twitter 2.0.” There are not very many companies in the world operating at Twitter scale. Twitter’s engineering blog is a good reminder that it takes than your average smart developer to keep Twitter running smoothly.
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It will take some time before I trust any deep dive into What Went Wrong™, but it seems like a few things are obvious already:
7a. Advertisers are not as easy to impress as “nerds with money.”
7b. Software is not hardware.
7c. There may be no end of people willing to put up with just about anything to work on rockets or electric cars, but that may not be true for large-scale web services with a reputation for toxicity.
I’ve managed to make it this far without saying anything negative about a single oligarch, so it seems like a good place to stop.
@pwinn Hi