Who Killed Twitter - My Opinion

Two authors wrote books. In these books they speak about whether Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk killed twitter. The answer is neither. If Twitter was alive and healthy it would never have been sold to an individual for four times its value, because its growth potential would have made this absurd.

Twitter died by 2007, with the advent of hashtags. That’s when twitter went from being a community of friends to being a community of strangers trying to get a million followers, and using hashtags to jump into conversations that they were not devoted to. At the first tuttle meetups and tweetups everyone knew everyone else from twitter. No one was a stranger to anyone else.

It’s when I went to a tweetup and I heard someone say “i’m not really a twitter user, I just came to the tweetup because it’s being hyped up.” That’s when twitter declined even more.

If we fast forward by a little more than a decade I believe that the pandemic killed Twitter, and Social Media. I believe this because before the pandemic normal people were on Facebook, and possibly Reddit and other social networks but they were not on Twitter. To a large extent they weren’t on FB either.

During the pandemic social media became more unpleasant. Trolling became more common. Trolling is the reason I dumped facebook for two to three years. Amplified loneliness is why I dumped Instagram and never returned.

The idea that Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk killed twitter is erroneous. Marketers did. Public relations firms did. People who took a utilitarian view of social media killed Twitter.

Twitter was fantastic, when it was a network of friends chatting with friends. It stopped being that in 2007-2008. I still used it but my ROI had declined dramatically.

Is this due to moving from London to Switzerland? I don’t think so. I just think that Twitter was best, when it had value to small communities, rather than marketers, public relations people and other groups with a utilitarian agenda.

Articles like this one are never written by people who live and breath social media. They are written by outsiders looking in. We could read them, but because of my perspective they have no value. By perspective I mean my attitude towards social networks and social media.

And Finally

Twitter wasn’t killed by Dorsey or Musk. It was killed by the people who took a utilitarian approach to social media. They turned Twitter from a tool for communities to have conversations, and build projects together to a place where marketers and public relations firms could hijack conversations, and make it about following celebraties, rather than conversations.

When Twitter pivoted from being a social network to social media, it became less interesting. I deleted my first twitter account by 2008 or so, and only returned because Swiss television interviewed me about the social network.

When Musk bought Twitter it was already worthless.

The End of an Era

There was a time when Twitter was Twitter, Facebook was Facebook, Instagram was Instagram and Whatsapp was whatsapp. Over time they have all been bought or rebranded, and the things that made them so fantastic were destroyed. Society saw social media as an addiction. This attitude destroyed social networks.