A eulogy for Twitter: the place we journalists loved, for better or worse

For journalists, who moved on to Twitter early, its demise will mean the end of an era. Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters

For months now, Twitter users have been anticipating the platform’s demise. The technology is buggy and often appears to be breaking down. There’s a new corporate crisis every week. It’s a strange feeling to witness the death spiral of a major social media platform – not a planned shutdown or an attempted government ban, but a social network becoming a ghost town before our very eyes.

This week Mark Zuckerberg successfully launched Threads, a Twitter competitor that claimed 70m sign-ups by its second day. It has been widely interpreted as a potential death blow to an already struggling platform.