Whether you use Twitter or not, you need to realize that it has served (in pre-Elmo days at least) as a bulwark of journalism. A lot of journalists made names for themselves and accumulated huge followings when Twitter first came on the scene. At any given time of the day or night there are, or were, world class journalists posting pieces to the bird site. Now, that may come to an end.

I have personally been dealing with people all day who think I’ve lost my damn mind for inquiring if Twitter is actually going to go offline. Even Durrati thinks I’m a lunatic. He said, “You think he WANTS his spaceships and cars to blow up?” I said that the difference was that somebody else built this platform and built it soundly. Although incompetence and/or insolvency can tank anything, that’s a fact.

And Twitter has gone to hell on Musk’s watch. The bots and trolls and rise of hate speech is ridiculous, sometimes rising to the level of obscene. And I certainly agree that the public figures losing their blue checkmarks and nonentities willing to pay $8.00 a month to have a checkmark has tanked the entire point of the checkmarks. The blue checks were once a badge of honor, a certification from management that you were who you said you were and you were credible enough to warrant a blue check. Now all that is gone.

What’s happening is hashtags like @RIPTwitter are trending and scenes from Titanic are playing. This is what got the ball rolling.

All I know is when the day dawns that Devin Nunes is running a more efficient social media platform than you are, you have fucked up bigly. I mean yugely.

As to how the demise of Twitter, should it come, affects us: We get a lot of our videos and material from Twitter. I live on Twitter. And the advantage of the site, as stated, is that a lot of journalists and influencers post on Twitter. If Lincoln Project posts a video, or the New Yorker puts up some great article, or if something breaks at the House or Senate and C-Span posts video, it all gets posted to Twitter. We pick up on it and run with the ball.

Also, we get a certain amount of traffic from Twitter and that’s money in the bank.

And we’re not the only ones. The demise of Twitter would affect news gathering significantly and peoples’ pocketbooks. We all post our wares for free in the Twitter marketplace but if people click on an article, then kaching! Cash register time. I don’t know exactly what a post-Twitter world will look like but we may be about to find out.

Durrati says he’s checking out Spoutable. I have been wait-listed for months on something called Post. I think they may have lost me in the shuffle. Bottom line, it doesn’t matter where I go, it matters where the heavy hitters on Twitter go, the ones with the 250K to 1 million followers. Those are the people I need to follow.

Another thing that will be tragic is the loss of the Twitter archive, but since that’s stored in the Cloud, maybe people can access it for research purposes. I am strictly speculating here, I haven’t a clue.

What an amazing development, although not an unexpected one. Musk has owned Twitter for six months now and has grotesquely mismanaged it the entire time. Jack Dorsey built a mansion. Elon Musk turned it into an outhouse.

It is analogous to the Titanic. The ship may have been the best built ever, but if you steer into an iceberg, it doesn’t matter. Elon Musk is Twitter’s iceberg.

Que sera sera. We don’t know what will be, we can only wait. My personal prayer is that somebody persuades him to sell while Twitter is still more or less intact.

 

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12 COMMENTS

  1. Sorry but I cannot agree that anyone needs TWITter (or Fakebook)! As long as social media is run as a for-profit business, it is a cancer on our society that (like the MAGA cult) must be cut out! As to what TWITter could be replaced with, I don’t know. That is a puzzle for someone smarter than me!

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  2. Any body remember myspace? social platforms come and go. it is sad when one platform that people have congregated around gets trashed intentionally. 6 months from now no one will be on twitter anymore. Some other site will take over. There will be chaos for awhile, but Just like any technology like phone chargers, eventually another standard will rise to the top. Ironically, this is happening when electronic vehicle chargers appear to be coalescing around Tesla.

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  3. When you are diabolically wealthy, (see family background)you can buy and break expensive toys with casual indifference cos’ you get to express “whims” due to callous compartmentalization socialization.

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  4. I joined Twitter in March 2011, jeez to go back
    Twitter back then was a micro blog, be cool in 144 characters, mostly poets , haiku was popular, you can’t go back, I used Twitter less over time. another social media? I doubt it
    it was really cool,

    come close grandchildren
    Steven will tell the story of cable television
    and the internet.

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  5. Please don’t give up on Post News. Try again. It is a safe, kind site and more and more people are joining up. The founders have built something wonderful. Many dead bird refugees landed there, and landed safely. Please try again! So few trolls and magas there and more journalists and bloggers are joining daily. It’s easy to maneuver and use. It’s a great place!!!

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  6. To me it sounds like server issues – the head twit has fired the tech staff who maintained them and/or he’s not paying the running costs.

    The net result is the servers simply can’t handle what was, until now, their normal load and, instead of actually hiring people who KNOW what they’re doing, he’s out to pressurise users into that rip-off ‘blue check confirmation’.

    Who knows – maybe the Internet Research Agency will sign up all their bots for a worthless blue tick.

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  7. Well the whole twitter tweet, tweet. And the rest of the social network has always made very little sense. It’s always been a competition to see who could get away with the most crap. What gets me is that J6 was planned on twitters and no one knew even months afterwards.

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  8. Just asking? But can EU take over parts of Twitter in Europe? The actual servers and other physical assets as a utility (since USA has been in the ray-gun death spiral of stupidity with deregulation running rampant). The USA because of $$$ interests has had any meaningful regs or rules on social media even with its vast influence. Call me wolf boy, but twitter was or is being destroyed to gut the right kind of info getting out to global audiences and one of their big pipelines for $$ was cut off. Facebook somehow diverted ad revenue to Shapiro and other RW sites. Hmmm . Ct or just coincidence. Because leaving Twitter I forgot to put in my journal (I can’t really remember now🤔🤔) the journalist who was following/investigating ads and industry. Young lady who did dirty work but male boss (?) took the credit. Seems like an attack on sources of knowledge and where to find good solid references. Why I like old encyclopedias. Hard printed. Just look up stuff by the decades. An attack on institutions and the knowledge yeah but the access to it especially!!!

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  10. Under Aparteid Elon, Twitter has become a managed propaganda tool that is far more dangerous than it is useful, other than to the savvy who see it for what it has become. There are certainly alternatives, even though the mainstream media has becone a trained bird operation to spout the corporate party line. But there are still ways to get useful information more truthful than the propagandists with us to have access to. I love Tribel, but it, too, has an agenda to counteract the falsity of other social media. In doing so, even that site becomes problematic. Before the Internet, people actually dug for data and could usually find it and be far more well informed abou the realities of their world that we are not. Every site has an agenda, and of we use our brains, we will be able to wade through their murky waters and discover a semblance of truth. I am 80 years old, and my ageing brain gets a regular workout doing just that. It’s how I keep going . . .

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