The enemy of Twitter? It’s us.
Well, not me. But possibly you.
Here’s Adrienne LaFrance and Robinson Meyer with a eulogy for Twitter:
Twitter used to be a sort of surrogate newsroom/barroom where you could organize around ideas with people whose opinions you wanted to assess. Maybe you wouldn’t agree with everybody, but that was part of the fun. But at some point Twitter narratives started to look the same. The crowd became predictable, and not in a good way. Too much of Twitter was cruel and petty and fake. Everything we know from experience about social publishing platforms—about any publishing platforms—is that they change. And it can be hard to track the interplay between design changes and behavioral ones. In other words, did Twitter change Twitter, or did we?
Twitter changed, for sure, but that’s not the real problem. It was totally us that spoiled it. And, again, not me. But maybe you, and a lot of other people who came on board to (unwittingly I presume) find things that emotionally fire something up in them, and allow them to feel morally superior, either by dint of being offended or as part of an upright citizens’ mob against someone who said The Wrong Thing.
More LaFrance and Meyer:
…When it was good—when it is good—Twitter created an environment characterized by respect and jokes so funny you wanted to show the person sitting next to you in real life. Not agreeing could be productive, and could happen without devolving into histrionics. The positive feedback loop of faves and interactions didn’t hurt, either.
It can still be this way from time to time. The authors say that nobody “hangs out there” anymore, but I still do. It’s like a neighborhood you grew up in, and love and know intimately, but then the place starts getting developed and folks who don’t appreciate the place’s quirks move in and try and sanitize it.
So there’s Google+. I’m there a lot more lately, but as others have noted, this has a lot to do with the fact that so few people are there. That it hasn’t taken off with the general public is a feature, not a bug. The folks that are there, well, they’re not unlike those who were on Twitter in Olden Times. Early adopters, a little more technologically sophisticated, and eager to experiment with a new publishing platform. But of course, now Google+’s future is in doubt.
But in the abstract I prefer Twitter, because of its parameters, its limitations. The modern Web is too full of bells and whistles, of full-bleed images and dynamic content, of Choruses and Snowfalls. Twitter is (was) 140 characters of text, and we embraced the quirks and kludges that needed to be adopted within those parameters to make a little more sense of it all. It was simple, it was busy, it was a percolator of thoughts, both profound and profoundly silly.
Now, it’s people finger-wagging and high-horsing. Now, it’s people trivializing the grave and ascribing gravity to the trivial. Now, it’s high dudgeon as parlor game. Now, it’s a lot of sadness.
For me, I mean. Maybe not you.
I hold out hope that there will be a boiling point, where the finger-waggers become so chronically incensed that they’ll move on, and a little of what Twitter was might come back. I’ll wait it out a while longer.
Hey, there’s always App.net.
Sigh.
Near-Earth Object 