In its heyday, which I would clock at around 2007, Twitter was a cool place to visit. There was a sense of belonging that hearkened back to finding your people in the school lunchroom. Hanging out on the platform helped you feel not quite so alone—a boon in an increasingly anti–real life world. Twitter was where you had direct access to celebrities, who might read your tweets or even retweet or reply to them. Where you could find your niche communities and where millions of people from all over the world, with nothing in common except their love of Star Wars, K-pop, or My Little Pony, could out-nerd—and out-meme—each other.
That version of Twitter no longer exists. As Siva Vaidhyanathan points out in his recent piece in the Guardian, Twitter doesn’t even seem to be trying to retain its users at this point. Nothing Elon Musk has done since his takeover appears to be about improving the experience of the site. Between reinstating banned accounts in the name of free speech, monetizing the blue checkmark into a badge of shame rather than a symbol of authenticity and credibility, throttling traffic to other platforms, failing to remove hateful tweets, and imposing limits on how many tweets we can see, Musk has restyled Twitter in his own narcissistic and paranoid image. Staring into that mirror is not something most users want.
