Finally Admitting Twitter is Dead
The reports of record engagement are fake. The site is a zombie.
I did not want to accept that Twitter was dying. My account, politicsanded, had grown rapidly from 2021 to 2023, from a few thousand to over 15,000. It gave me wide audience to engage with in terms of my interests in urbanism, as well as my research background in international higher education.
My ‘We Ruined Our Own Cities’ series was a hit on the platform. This is where I would show before and after photos of cities ruined by 21st-century auto-centric design. These Tweet storm threads would routinely get hundreds of thousands of views. One of the most popular threads even got shared by Massachusetts senator Ed Markey.
These tweet storms were a lot of work, as I often had to not only find the photos but also provide some context and background. But they were fun and led to some good recognition, such as my article in the Financial Times: ‘The road to ruin — how the car drove US cities to the brink’.
I had to stop doing these posts on Twitter when it became X (a new name I cannot get myself to ever call the platform). With Elon Musk’s takeover, and all the changes he brought, engagement has nosedived on the social media site. Posts that would have gotten thousands of engagements in the past have trickled to just a couple hundred.
The site simply does not feel worthy of my time anymore.
Not About the Money
For me, it is not about paying the $8 or whatever the small fee is now to get a Blue check mark, along with the added reach/ boost. The site is already hollowed out. Too many people left, too many people stopped posting. It is not the same community.
Even if I paid for Blue, the rest of the site has been losing posters and users. The algorithm boosts large accounts at the expense of smaller accounts, espcially the no-payers. It funnels everyone to engagement farmers or bombastic clickbait in the For You tab, not to mention trolls or porn bots.
I even went through my follow and followers lists recently. What I found was that a lot of people simply left for other social media sites, but there were actually a bunch of people still there who I used to interact with regularly. They were still posting, their content just simply never appeared in my feed anymore!
Big accounts, then, have been taking views from what should be users’ real networks. These big accounts do not notice the drop in engagement. Instead, they have likely seen stable or even more engagement, with the added payment feature. So we hear people with big accounts claim Musk saved the site or it is better than ever due to ‘free speech’.
But everyone on the bottom can see this isn’t true. It’s a good way to understand how a leader surrounds himself with ‘Yes’ Men.
If you search through comments complaining about lack of engagement, they come from all around the political spectrum. It’s not just right or left wing. While they each claim Musk is ‘censoring’ or ‘shadowbanning’ them, what is actually happening is engagement is dropping for everyone and what remains is being siphoned to big accounts.
Short-term tactic, long-term failure. The site is a walking corpse, a zombie.
I miss old Twitter but am thankful I’ve found many accounts I used to enjoy (including yours) over here!
Facebook is like this now as well.