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An Age of Less, and Less Reliable, Information
What happens when Twitter dies?
I was reading a couple of articles on the slow, unpleasant death of Twitter the other day, mostly out of schadenfreude — hey, a guy’s gotta have some fun, right?
In many ways, the Muskification of Twitter has been great for me, because it incentivized me to quit the platform. I never posted much or made personal connections on Twitter, but I used it as an information aggregator. In many ways, it was great — I learned a lot and found a bunch of really useful stuff for my day job and my internet-writing hobby. But Twitter was manipulative, addictive, and made me feel bad much of the time. Being exposed to nonstop stimulation, especially the performative anxiety and outrage that Twitter specializes in, wasn’t great for my mental health. So I’m mostly glad that I had an excuse to quit.
Since quitting Twitter, I’ve replaced it in some ways — I mess around on Mastodon and subscribed to a bunch of newsletters — but haven’t found a full replacement for the informational serendipity of Twitter. It was cool to stumble across a thread on plummeting crab populations or Russian military truck maintenance and learn something fascinating that I would have never known to seek out.
That’s why Natasha Lomas’ piece in Techcrunch rang true to me — she wrote:
[T]he real pull and power of the platform came from the incredible wealth of knowledge any Twitter user could directly tap into — across all sorts of professional fields, from deep tech to deep space and far beyond — just by listening in on a discussion thread or sliding a question into someone’s DMs.
Above all Twitter was an information network; the social element came a distant second.
I will miss this aspect of Twitter, and I have to say that, though I feel great about quitting, I sort of worry that I’m missing out on all of the information I once had access to.
Matt Pearce’s article in the LA Times is also perceptive. He, too, discusses the way in which Twitter put a seemingly endless array of expertise and information at our fingertips. We didn’t have to work very hard to discover fascinating and useful things all the time. But, as the platform declines…
