We Need To Talk: Twitter is Over. No Really, It's Over.
“I’m paying $8 a month, and they’re treating us like guinea pigs.
They’re using us as the guinea pigs. They’re just making changes, and rolling them out without testing, and using us as the guinea pigs.”
My friend, the kind of close friend where you know all the dirt, have been to all the apartments, just had their editorial published in the New York Post. Not just online! In PRINT! It should have been a peak personal and career experience. And yet, the image of a guinea pig, cornered in a cage lined with tiny turds, and maybe a plastic igloo to hide in, was the one he kept circling back to, describing how he was sure Twitter was just broken in a million tiny ways, he had proof, they came out and admitted it! It was really broken! But they wouldn’t fix it! And he was paying eight dollars!
I offered to try and find a print copy of the New York Post and explained that I didn’t think they would ever fix it and had moved on from Twitter. I was now on Mastodon, which is smaller, but not being run by a crazy person.
I had not wanted to join Mastodon. Another app had all the appeal of sour milk after years of feeling manipulated and gaslit by first Facebook, and then Twitter, and then Instagram. I was tired of the same people, the same faces, the same stupid games. Whatever I was going to do by being on an app felt very over, a relic of a previous era, before coronavirus, or Ukraine, or any of the other big disruptions of the past several years.
But what I realized after spending a few months playing with Mastodon is that it is not an app. It is the thing that will break the frustrating 2010’s era paradigm of the app, The Apps, the app stores.
Mastodon is a return to the open web, and that’s starting to show up in the analytics of this website. This website is tiny, sure, but let’s be realistic: clicks through to an actual website that is not just a Facebook page have always been the gold standard, with online advertising, with social media, with SEO, with anything like that.
See where the orange line, social media, goes to almost zero? It’s what happened after Elon Musk bought Twitter. There’s no other factor here.
It couldn’t come at a better time. The meltdown of Silicon Valley Bank has been analyzed to the point of nausea by every analyst and podcast and a million editorials with a lot of numbers and a lot of references to stuff like the Federal Reserve Bank or the bond market. It’s the SIB’s, it’s Dodd-Frank, it’s the interest rates, I don’t fucking know. All I know is:
It’s over.
OVER.
O - V - E - R
Most people are still in denial about this, like the people at the end of the movie The Big Short that had to go back to their normal jobs instead of flipping houses. And it’s understandable. Tech wasn’t just a vacuum for venture capital over the past 20 years - it sucked up all our identity capital too, into endless bickering over Facebook relationship statuses and they/them pronouns and whatever an influencer is. And people are very stubborn about clinging to anything that gets ahold of that precious identity capital.
It was a great and cynical strategy. Facebook made itself the driver’s license for the internet. But at some point, well, to steal a metaphor from the movie that launched Margot Robbie into the sun: the music stops. The Jazz Age eventually came to an end, and F. Scott Fitzgerald made a career out of chronicling the lives of the people who were desperate to cling onto the belief that it wouldn’t. But for everyone else, there was the stock market crash, and the Depression, and World War 2, and they moved on with their lives amid a lot of miserable history.
This is all just more of that. We’re a pandemic, a war, and now a bank crash past the time when Twitter was still fun and useful for anything. People aren’t on Twitter because it’s still enjoyable to be there in the present era. They’re on there because they want it to be what Twitter was like in about 2013 all over again. Use a hashtag and get free drink tickets. Zero interest rate policies. Getting featured on CNN after being fired from a low-level job for posting a lewd photo or offensive joke. That’s all over. It is not ever coming back. But because it happened in the past, and it made the good brain chemicals run wild, people are still on Twitter waiting for it to happen again. They are, to put it bluntly: delusional.
We are in the era of rampant inflation, paywalls everywhere, and the biggest age cohort of people in America, by far, are people about my age (33). At this point, hearing people that all made their social media accounts in 2009 reminiscing about the good old days of Twitter sounds more like boomers talking about JFK or driving a convertible in high school than it does like the future of technology or social media. O-V-E-R.
If you run a website, dig into your site analytics, and compare back to the pre-covid era. I bet you’ll see the same exact thing. Social media was the only game in town until exactly 2020, and then fell off, first slowly as people got vaccinated and had more to do again, and then all at once after Elon Musk jumped in and decided he was a media kingpin. (He is not. Sorry.)
And that’s really what social media always was, it was always just an extension of regular old media stuff but online.
I know this, because I worked in a social media role for 6 years. And what did I do before that? I was at a regular old PR firm where they made things like TV ads and did ghostwriting for the editorials that appear in a local newspaper. That was the track to actually doing any of the cool social media jobs in the 2010’s, it was to start somewhere that just had regular ad budgets for print or TV and move into social media and AdWords and all the rest of it.
Those people aren’t listening to anybody on Mastodon yet, but they will. Because they are going to start seeing a lot of charts that look a lot like the one in this post, and panic. Where are the NUMBERS?! Is our traffic pipeline BROKEN!?
Yes, it is. And they’re not going to fix it. It is time to just move on. The advertisers already did.
If you have access to a backend site analytics dashboard that looks like the above and are able to share, jump into the contact form. Twitter really does seem to be dying, but what will actually help prove that to the people that can move the needle on getting it out of the way is decent data.
