Twitter (2006 - 2023)

» see twitter.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

twitter launched on 21 march 2006. jack dorsey posted the first tweet ("just setting up my twttr"). the product was a public micro-blogging service: 140 characters per post, a chronological timeline of people you followed, replies and retweets as the basic interaction model. it ran for 17 years as twitter, then on 23 july 2023 elon musk renamed it X. the product at twitter.com today is the same domain, but it is not the same site.

i used twitter heavily from around late 2008 onwards. it was the place i followed people in tech, where i argued with strangers about programming languages, where i watched events happen in real time. the bbc tweeted breaking news. people in revolutions tweeted from the ground. comedians workshopped jokes. the timeline was a strange real-time public coffee shop where everyone was talking at once and you could pick which conversation to listen in on.

the cultural peak was somewhere between 2010 and 2018. the platform was central to how journalists, technologists, comedians, activists, academics, and a few politicians communicated publicly. major events (the arab spring, the 2016 US election, every news story between 2012 and 2018) were also social events on twitter. the platform had real cultural power for that decade.

the slow erosion started around 2018. moderation became the central political fight inside the company and outside it. some of the most-followed accounts got banned. some of the bans were reversed. trust in the platform's editorial choices declined. growth slowed. the company stayed unprofitable. then in october 2022 musk completed his acquisition for 44 billion dollars. the staff was cut by about 80 percent over the following months. the moderation team was largely disbanded. previously banned accounts came back. on 23 july 2023 the company was renamed X. the bird logo was retired. the cultural product called twitter ended on that date even though the site still works.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what twitter actually was ~

twitter was a public timeline. you followed accounts you cared about. their posts appeared in chronological order. when you posted something, your followers saw it. when someone replied, you got a notification. retweets amplified posts to your followers' followers. that was the basic mechanic.

the 140-character limit (raised to 280 in november 2017) was the constraint that shaped the culture. you had to be brief. that brevity selected for jokes, hot takes, headlines, and short sharp arguments. it punished long-form thinking. it rewarded one-liners. for some kinds of communication this was a great fit. for others it was a terrible one. the ratio of jokes-to-essays on twitter was always lopsided in jokes' favor.

the chronological default was the other shaping force. early twitter showed posts in the order they were posted. you saw the world as it was happening. when twitter switched to an algorithmic timeline (around 2016), the experience changed. the algorithm rewarded engagement, which mostly meant outrage and confrontation. the chronological timeline never fully came back, even though there was a "latest" tab.

~ the years 2008 to 2018 ~

this was the peak. twitter was where the discourse happened. the early 2010s saw twitter at its most useful: real-time news, real-time technical conversations among engineers and scientists, real-time political organizing during the arab spring and occupy wall street. the platform had a sense of being a shared public space.

i had favorite accounts that taught me things. tech writers, security researchers, distributed-systems people, security incident responders. you could follow a thread of replies under a major bug disclosure and learn more in twenty minutes than you would in a textbook. you could watch a baseball game with a few thousand other people commenting in real time. you could ask a stupid question and a domain expert would sometimes answer.

the trolls and the bad actors were always there but the moderation was just-okay enough that the platform mostly worked. the worst accounts got suspended. the worst behaviors got rate-limited. the public-square feel was real even though the cracks were visible if you looked. twitter felt important in a way that felt earned. that was the feeling that ended.

~ the slow erosion ~

the period from 2018 to 2022 was a slow decline. several things happened together. the company was under constant pressure to be profitable, which it never quite was. moderation decisions about high-profile users (most famously the 2021 ban of a former US president) became the central political fight, which exhausted everyone. growth slowed. the algorithm got more aggressive about pushing controversy.

the user experience also got worse in small ways. notifications got noisier. the algorithm started inserting tweets from people you did not follow. the official mobile apps got slower. third-party clients (which had historically been the best way to use twitter) got progressively restricted. most of them were killed in early 2023, after the musk acquisition.

the texture of the conversation changed too. the platform felt more confrontational, more performative, less curious. some of this was the algorithm. some was the broader change in how people communicated online during the pandemic years. some was specific to twitter. you could feel the public-square quality fading. by 2022 a lot of the people i had followed for years were posting less.

~ the acquisition and the X transformation ~

elon musk made an unsolicited offer to buy twitter in april 2022. the offer was at 54.20 dollars per share, total around 44 billion. there was a long legal back-and-forth where musk tried to get out of the deal, lost in delaware court, and ultimately closed on 27 october 2022. he became the sole owner.

the staff cuts started immediately. roughly 80 percent of employees were either laid off or quit over the following months. the trust and safety team was significantly reduced. content moderation policies were revised. a number of previously suspended accounts were reinstated. paid blue checkmarks were introduced (you could buy verification, which had previously been restricted to verified identities). the timeline algorithm was modified to give more weight to paying users.

on 23 july 2023 the brand was renamed X. the bird logo was retired. the company is now formally X corp. the URL twitter.com redirects to x.com. the old export of your twitter data still uses the old branding. for old-time users, the moment of the rename was the formal end of the thing they had been using. some stayed. many drifted to mastodon, bluesky, or just stopped posting. the site is still busy, but it is a different busy.

~ what we lost ~

the public square. for a decade twitter was where a meaningful slice of public conversation happened, in something like real time, accessible to everyone with an account. there is no clear successor to that. mastodon is too fragmented. bluesky is small and growing but not at twitter scale. threads is meta-controlled and feels different. the old function of "if it is happening, somebody on twitter is talking about it right now" is mostly gone. each replacement covers a slice but none has the whole.

the third-party client ecosystem. for years twitter had a vibrant third-party app scene. tweetdeck, twitterrific, tweetbot, echofon. these clients often had better interfaces than the official app. they were killed in early 2023 when the API access rules changed. that ecosystem is not coming back. the new platforms have started locking down their APIs in similar ways. third-party-clients-as-a-default-feature is gone from social media.

the texture of being on twitter in 2014. the specific feeling of opening the app at 9pm and seeing a tweet from a developer you respected, reading their thread, replying, getting a reply back, and learning something. that experience was real and it is hard to describe to anyone who was not on the platform during those years. the X version of twitter does not produce that experience anymore. neither does anything else right now. that is the real loss.

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