6/16/2023 0 Comments Spiral knights twitterOn Twitter, influential faces slop from the trough alongside us ordinary folk and facile discourse like ‘should kink be allowed at pride?’ shapes their perspective while entrenching an ‘us vs them’ impression. But for those interested in creating a more progressive, equal society, Twitter’s demise may overall be a blessing in disguise.įor all its pockets of connectivity, the site’s wider impact has also been to warp perceptions of what ‘people’ – that vague, imprecise category – are talking about, to blow fringe issues up into ‘discourse’, where it is beamed into the eyeballs of the elites who direct conversation and policy outside of the site. All of these things are true Twitter contains multitudes, just as its users do. What happens if, for all intents and purposes, Twitter ‘dies’? Many have been preemptively mourning the benefits it has offered over the years including the amplification of voices otherwise often silenced community, organising, education and the development of our greatest 21st century cultural output: the meme. Its most active users – who generate the most revenue – were in decline before Musk even signed on the dotted line to acquire the site. Twitter’s influence is massively outsized it’s by far the smallest of the major social networks and only has an estimated 290m users worldwide (thousands of whom are, according to Elon Musk, bots), to the billions who flock to Facebook or TikTok. But even for the users that stay on Twitter for the moment, undeterred by either the rabid press appetite for its demise (what a story!), or the politics of its new boss, there are predictions that using the site will become such a logistical headache in the wake of staff cutbacks, its relevance death warrant is in the post. Musk’s first moves upon acquiring Twitter has seen an exodus of users and, more significantly, advertisers spooked by the impact of layoffs on the site’s content moderation, increasing the mountain he has to climb. Uncertainty is never good for business, let alone one already beleaguered by a faltering user base. All this is in aid of making Twitter profitable enough to comfortably cover the annual £1bn interest payments Musk has levied on the company in order to buy it (at a vastly overinflated price) in the first place. Bright ideas range from charging ‘verified’ users a monthly fee, to bringing back the defunct money pit of a video platform, Vine. Billionaire Elon Musk has completed his takeover of Twitter and chaos has immediately ensued: mass layoffs of key staff, followed by swift rehires because well, they’re key staff Twitter’s board dissolved and replaced by a cabal of rich tech bros, now acting as Musk’s unofficial advisors on the changes he should implement. Yet now, we are warned by commentators and experts, this really could be the end times, not just culturally but functionally. Depending who you ask, the platform has been in a downward spiral for the majority of its lifespan it’s a “hellsite”, users frequently complain, a cesspit of misinformation, aggression and polarisation.
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