What We’ll Lose When We Lose Twitter

Since Elon Musk’s ultimatum to Twitter employees to “go extreme hardcore” or take off ended with an apparent decimation of the site’s remaining workforce on Thursday night, TwitterTWTR
has been hosting an ongoing wake for itself. Longtime users who have enjoyed (or not) a love-hate relationship with the platform have been acting out the stages of grief in 240-character bursts.

The prevailing sentiment among power users is that Twitter may have been a hellsite, but it was our hellsite. Its seemingly-inevitable collapse is going to leave a big hole in the lives of information junkies everywhere.

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That all may be true, but it’s not even a fraction of the larger story. Twitter’s detractors are quick to point out that it is a relatively small part of the social media ecosystem, dwarfed by titanic content-oriented competitors like TikTok, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram and Alphabet’s YouTube.

However, Twitter has never been about depth of content. Instead, it provides immediacy and simultaneity across information space. Think of it like a fly’s wide-angle, multifaceted eyes, optimized to spot motion at the periphery and enable instant reaction.

Last week, ComScore CMO Tania Yuki explained how that allowed brands and Twitter’s commercial customers to instantly spot and jump in to emerging conversations as they were happening, so they could engage authentically with their customers around issues relevant in the moment. That dynamic is at the center of Twitter’s business value proposition.

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It only works that way for brands because it works that way for everything else. Some users come to Twitter to talk, but many more come to find out what people are talking about. The platform became indispensable for all kinds of communities that required the kind of strategic view of a situation that only comes from a patchwork of individual impressions—and for making sense of complex and fast-moving situations like natural disasters, political upheavals, economic trends and more.

Once the platform got to scale, it became a unique window into the global subconscious. The data stream that came out the back end was unique and invaluable for mapping complicated relationships between invisible communities, content consumption, patterns of influence, and modes of engagement.

Those who knew what to do with that data could use it to achieve important business objectives. The more you know about an audience, the more relevant and targeted you can make your own content—making it more likely those people will take whatever actions you are trying to encourage.

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Sometimes people didn’t even need access to advanced data and analytics to understand how to take advantage of this. Twitter rewarded individual users with an innate understanding of how to communicate and engage whilst giving them instant, low-cost access to a global stage. One of those users ended up being the President of the United States for a while. Another built a fortune big enough to buy Twitter, then break it like a 4 year-old with a toy on Christmas morning.

But others built platforms for themselves and their ideas that they could not have reached through any other medium. Every publisher, artist, filmmaker, or creator of any kind who used Twitter to disseminate news about their activities will miss it badly and likely experience a huge, immediate drop in reach and income if the platform goes down.

Twitter’s power came with abuses, including the ability to wreck the lives of strangers with the speed and suddenness of a drone strike, to gin up fear, and to mobilize destabilizing mass movements rooted in half-baked ideas, clever memes and the illusion of empowerment. If Twitter goes down, those parts of it will not be missed.

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Successor platforms might be able to replicate or surpass Twitter’s functionality, but they will not come close to matching its true value for a long, long time, if ever. Twitter was not about any individual set of conversations or relationships, as important as those may have been to its most dedicated users. It was about the sum total of all those conversations happening everywhere, all the time, all at once.

We can move to Mastodon or onto Discord servers or other places to maintain our personal and professional networks. However, by design, these remain villages and gated communities. We can enjoy the benefits of the neighborhood, but we will miss the conveniences of the big city – most of all, the ability to look out a window from commanding heights and witness the totality of all the chaos, bustle, dynamism and activity in a single view.