I wrote about the last great account left on here. https://t.co/S6eSZZSrwf
— David Roth (@david_j_roth) September 13, 2023
Bad news about Twitter arrives with the dull regularity of junk mail. The site is bad and getting worse, and if that was always at least kind of true even during what now qualifies as its heyday, it is now bad and worsening in exceptionally unappealing ways. What was good about Twitter, when it was good, always had a lot to do with its signature jostling chaos and the attendant sense of wild and worrying possibility; it was, in a way that every other thing in the free market strives not to be, a place where strange and unexpected things routinely happened. While the site is outwardly much uglier and more chaotic and demonstrably more arbitrary under its new ownership, it’s also increasingly grim and airless and stupendously, implausibly wack.
“You canât reach an audience on X,” Dave Karpf wrote last week. “You canât organize on X. You canât follow breaking news on X. The people who made Twitter fun have all given up. Thereâs nothing worth sticking around for anymore.”
Some of this may just be Twitter hewing closer to the deeply diseased personality and addled vision of owner Elon Musk, but it’s also indistinguishable from the routine ways in which online spaces die, which is by collapsing into a cacophony of scams and hate speech and dim, windy monologues from the worst users. As it stands, Twitter does not work. In the ways in which it once worked, always despite itself and always as a result of the many people who made it something stranger and more vital than it had any right to be, it no longer does. In the ways in which it was once useful, it is now unusable. In the ways in which it was reliably surprising and often fun, it is now neither.
Saturday Afternoon Read: On Twitter’s DeclinePost + Comments (119)