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An Elegy for Twitter

 

Have you heard the news? The marketplace is filled with the gossip, guards on the walls grimly discuss it down in their barracks while in the forum it’s tidings are whispered by the frantic senators. Meanwhile lone St Jerome sits in his monastic cell gently weeping, for all are saying that Twitter, the Great and Mighty, has fallen… or is about to fall, depending on who is telling the story.

Yes, you’ve probably heard the news by now – Twitter is dying. In fact, when I first thought to write this post earlier this week, it seemed that its death might only be a possibility, but now it seems the writing is definitely on the wall. Increasing numbers of people are searching for alternative sites, others like myself are just sharing links to our other social media accounts so that (in theory) the end of twitter might not be the end of every virtual interaction made during our time on here[1]. And now as the band begins to play the final tune, I thought it would be a fitting opportunity to think back over my eleven years on the platform.

 

 
Probably one of the only songs I know about Twitter so I guess the band will just have to play it!


In some ways I’ve had a rather unsuccessful twitter career since with eleven years of tweeting too much under my belt I only have 865 followers – enough to look like I’m not a bot, but too few to really ever go viral. While most of my tweets get some interaction, still many of mine end up discarded by the algorithm, left aimless and unread until I inevitably delete them. (The fact that I still maintain an old habit of deleting them all every six months also means that they are unlikely to see more engagement[2].) And with Twitter about to die, I guess I shall have to admit that my dream of becoming the main voice on every topic I’m interested in shall have to die as well. At least I will always have my TikTok.

More seriously, I am thankful that I learnt long ago that Twitter was more fun when you were willing to just tweet what you like rather than chase after the algorithm. Suddenly you find that the platform becomes less the world’s worst MMO – a grind to grow followers in the hope that someone will notice you – and instead, becomes a place where you find likeminded individuals interested in the things you do as well. The fact that I get any engagement when I started tweeting about Le Morte D’Arthur is incredible. I mean there is niche and then there is very niche.

            How did this Tweet got 25 likes!

And that’s the beauty of Twitter, you can log on and first see somebody responding to the most niche Tweet in the world, then an old school friend posts their views about the news, followed by the Pope tweeting in Latin[3], followed by a picture of a French painting and so it continues. Sure if you go searching out, for example, Arthurian groups online you might be able to find a very intense “community” willing to discuss in hyper detail your topic (or more likely send you to an old forum discussion because they don’t like people posting who haven’t been there since 2002) but only on Twitter did the expert and the amateur hang out. We were not gated away into tiny Discords, Reddits or bulletin boards, but instead there was a great big town square and there was a lot of fun to be had there.

I guess it’s fair to say that even before the current crisis there was a general feeling that twitter was slowly dying. The company had struggled with the changing political climate, its finances were always precarious, and ultimately it was struggling to define itself in the more audio-visual age of TikTok and Discord. Perhaps then it was always going to collapse and all that’s happened is that its end has come faster than expected. Still even if collapse was inevitable, I am willing to say that the passing of Twitter, a platform many of us have enjoyed for years, will be at least a little sad. Sic transit gloria mundi[4].

 


[1] I’ve met too many people in the political and climate world who I’ve first encountered online to be dismissive over online interactions. Sometimes a good tweet can actually be the beginning of a friendship.

[2] This would be a much more fun retrospective if I could look at the graphs of my tweets, but ultimately I tend to the old-fashioned view that tweets are supposed to be fleeting. (Also means I don’t have to worry about future employers reading what I said when I was 17)

[3] Yup the official Latin account for Pope Francis exists: https://twitter.com/Pontifex_ln

[4] Thus passes the glory of the world.

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