The misery machine

It sounds like Musk in on course to actually buy Twitter, barring and further chicanery or legal shenanigans. (I'm planning for the fact that it will happen, but also assuming nothing, given who this involves and his track record on actually ever doing anything.)

I know this is more complicated for a lot of people, and I'm not going to hand wave it away and be like 'and nothing of value was lost', because that collapses a lot of different things that people do get out of Twitter. But also, I do think the world would be net-better-off without it at this stage.

Sure, Twitter was (comparatively) nice once. The problem is... well, the problems are many. Twitter gets held up as this bastion of free expression, the new public square, etc. etc. and it's obviously not any of those things. What Twitter is that makes it seem like it might be that is a) an early-mover social media site that didn't set walls between different groups of users and b) generally very poor at all the horrible business model stuff that social media sites cleave to. That latter point particularly does not mean it's not doing all those things -- just that it's been sufficiently, historically bad at it that it sometimes seems like these factors don't impact how it operates.

Twitter is not the public square. We are sorely lacking for those kinds of third spaces that aren't owned or commoditised by private interests, but a) it is owned and commoditised by private interests, b) public squares aren't meant to be that honkingly big and undelineated. It sucks that we're in a position where this is presented as a credible third space while being really almost but not quite entirely unlike one.

If Twitter goes away, either de facto or de jure, I think the world as a whole will be better off for it (with the caveat that there's no one clear replacement for the role that it plays -- I think that's a good thing but obviously this argument doesn't really work if some new horrible interest just picks up where it left off).

Once again: that's not to dismiss the fact that it would still suck for a lot of people. People who depend on or have various needs met by Twitter will lose out -- I'm not denying that. But part of the point is that... we don't get to choose what happens to Twitter, even collectively. Because it's not our space, and that's precisely the problem.

I'd be sad to see it go (I'm using 'go' here to mean 'change irrevocably if a significant enough number of influential people abandon the platform' rather than, like, be shut down, though I guess that's technically a possibility), but mostly out of a sense of nostalgia for what I remember it being once upon a time. Honestly, Twitter for me these days is mostly a misery machine.