Bye, Twitter

Sixteen years. So many great memories. Great example of early co-design and what was possible if you listened to user feedback.

A deep, deep love for a marvellous and important product. There are some who may think it is ‘cringe’ – as the kids say today – to be sad. But it is okay to be sad when you have invested time, and emotions and have happy memories attached to something.

So many take tech for granted. They don’t see invisible labour, the tireless work to remove friction, the tape and glue that keeps servers up, the content moderators’ trauma, the vision that we all had for a product like Twitter.

I’ve been rough on tech bros lately, but that comes from a place of disappointment at having seen what was done to these platforms, and what they were supposed to be.

Maybe I was the gullible one for believing in it in the first place, but there was a window there where things were truly… incredible. Lifelong friendships. So many laughs. So many people who met husbands and wives and whose children grew up alongside each other and never got to meet, making us act like a weird overenthusiastic but distant aunty to a very confused kid who thinks “um… do I know you?”.

I’ve even been the main character – zero stars would not recommend by the way, and thankfully it was in 2011 when it didn’t wreck your life and you could go back to normal by deleting your account, laying low for a bit and then starting over on a new account – but still, it was marvellous for this Perth girl who never fit in anywhere and would have gone insane if not for other weirdos on the virtual watercooler that was Twitter.

Then, selfish people – first, media and ‘brand’ people (who Twitter was supposed to disrupt) staged a hostile takeover, thinking the Internet was theirs to gentrify and control, were then overtaken by the jerks who think the internet is theirs to wreck, and other people mere tools for them to harass, threaten and defame.

Twitter was the love of my life. A deep nerdy love that first turned unhealthy but then turned abusive, where I convinced myself it could change, if I just kept trying harder. I even tried to work there so I could help fix things. I wrote a proposal on how to change the product and processes to solve the problems, several times. That went as far as their support tickets: nowhere.

Sunk costs and habit. That’s what remains.

And the handful of people who are still on there that I don’t want to lose touch with, so I will not completely delete, and still copypasta (I still want it to get better, but not at my expense). But no more than 5 minutes a day.

X in 2024 is a reality-distorting, crazy-making, deeply unhealthy and abusive app. It is the ‘everything app’, but not in the way he’d hoped. It’s everything that went wrong with the dream of the internet, rolled up into a big ball of shit. I won’t let Elon Musk drag me down with him in his descent into madness. Get some therapy, for heaven’s sake. He’s a grown man. It’s just …sad. It was always a bully machine, but the targets were usually deserving, but at some point it just became about righteous cruelty rather than truth to power.

Anyway, it’s been a long road. Yes, it’s cringe, but I’m allowed to be sad over what happened to the lofty idealistic dream that was the bird app from doom. It’s okay if you don’t get that. But know that it represents a dream that was promised, but unrealised, in many ways, for a cohort of people who more than just a financial stake in its success. I invested a lot into it. I got celebrities on it early on. I evangelised it to everyone who would listen.

And it’s done. It may change, but I doubt it. Without some serious intervention, that we all know is unlikely to happen, we have to learn from the mistakes, try again, and try to do it better next time. And no, I don’t think Bluesky is the answer, but… go nuts.

I suggest you do the same. If they’ve lost me, a Twitter addict who rationalises like a smackhead over the greatest app in the world that holds my friends in the little glass box… they’ve literally lost everyone.

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Here’s my handwritten notes from 2014 when they were struggling, pre-Trump. Trump saved Twitter. It could have been done differently and executed well, but nope. Musk fucked it and burned through all goodwill from people who agreed with him in the process.

This is still how you fix it from a product POV, but obviously, at the time, because non-psychopaths forget that psychopaths exist… I didn’t really address the bad actors. There are solutions to that, too.

I don’t regret any of it, because it brought me here, but I am still sad about it.