This is a short thought today, since it’s mostly jumping off my last post about Twitter. But with Twitter again in the news since their CEO is addicted to limelight, I figured I’d pontificate about why I think Twitter worked and may continue to work as a prestigious social media site despite proclamations of doom coming from every angle.

Note that I did say prestigious social media company. Some may turn up their noses, but Twitter was and still is the social network of choice for many companies to broadcast their content globally. Most companies wouldn’t be caught dead on Reddit, and Facebook doesn’t really enter into the social fabric as it once did, but the things that happen and are posted about on Twitter continue to drive endless news cycles, even when it’s not about Elon Musk, and companies want to take part in that conversation to direct it for their own ends. Companies and fame addicted continue to broadcast themselves on the Twitter, even as some of them start contemplating an escape route, but I don’t think one will be easy to find because nothing really replicates what Twitter is. Not Mastadon, not Post, not Substack, there is not a single social media site that is just “Twitter without Elon Musk.”

Twitter allows users to broadcast their message in ways that no other social media site does. While other sites do let you spread your message through posts and links, Twitter lets any and every user view your content if you attach yourself to multiple avenues of “trending topics” either with a hashtag, a phrase, or just putting yourself in the middle of a thread that’s trending. If you want people to see you, just look at the sidebar for what’s tending and try to put that somewhere in your tweet, the algorithms will find you and anyone searching the trending topics will see your tweet. If enough of them see and like your tweet, your tweet itself may trend and be made visible at the bottom of entirely unrelated tweets. Compare that to any other social media, the easiest example is Reddit which is a walled garden at the best of times: if you want people to see you there is no way at all to broadcast yourself to the entire Reddit community. At best you can join a highly popular subreddit and try to post in the highly upvoted threads, but even then you’re only speaking to a specific community in a specific thread. People in the r/cutekittens community will never ever see your epic takedown of Ron Desantis if you posted it in r/politics, and people in r/politics will never see your favorite fuzzball because you posted it in r/cutekittens. The moderators of the subreddits ensure that their communities stay “on topic” and thus separated from each other by a wall that can’t be breached. By contrast someone scrolling through @cutekittenpics will always see the trending topics on their sidebar, and your epic takedown of Ron Desantis may be trending there, putting the cat-scroller just a click away from seeing you.

Back to the moderators, Twitter is much more of a free-for-all than other social media. Of course there are rules and moderators will ban you if you break them, but the Twitter moderators are for lack of a better word more “professional” than most social media mods not least because Twitter mods are paid. By in large Twitter’s broad guidelines are but lightly enforced (especially now that Twitter is understaffed). Compare that to a subreddit where a volunteer moderators will ban you for no better reason than they’re on a power trip, or Mastodon where high-school level drama can get you banned from communities for being part of the wrong clique. Very little gets you banned from Twitter for any length of time. Just because you acted like a dumbass, or held extremist opinions, or just outright hate authority, you will still likely be able to tweet into the void for as long as you want so long as you don’t repeatedly violate their very very low standards of conduct. You can be infamous on Twitter but it’s very hard to be silenced, even before Elon Musk took over some of worst lightning rods in popular discourse kept their names alive on Twitter long after a Mastodon or Reddit admin would have banned them.

It’s not well appreciated, but these two factors; light touch moderation and ability to broadcast, go hand in hand as part of Twitter’s MO. Because no one is able to control the discourse the way a moderator would, companies and individuals feel free to set up shop and broadcast their message since they can’t be silenced by a cranky or drama-prone mod. And because every type of competing message is being broadcast at all times, Twitter becomes window into the “now” of society, a look at all those things being talked about right now but which may or may not still be important in a week. This window into the “now” draws in journalists, activists, and others who feed on discourse. The producers of discourse (companies, politicians, socialites) get attention, which they think will help them with whatever their goal is. The consumers of discourse (journalists, activists, socialites) get a window into the “now” which they think will help them with whatever their goal is. Note that many Twitter users are both producers and consumers of discourse, and I use the word “socialites” to demarcate anyone and everyone who enjoys or spends their time talking about society and humans in general (that includes most of us!).

This kind of firehose of social discourse, where everyone’s messages are constantly competing for views and clicks, is not replicated on any other social media that I know of. Some social media is heavily moderated, where the moderator gets to decide the narrow alley of what discourse is allowed (politics vs cute kittens) or of which views are allowed (right, left, center, etc). Other social media is heavily siloed, so even unmoderated discourse can’t spill out into each user’s individual walled garden. There really is nothing quite like Twitter at this point in time, and to me that explains why the vast majority of its users are sticking with the platform even while many of them dunk on the current owner and bemoan the downfall of their favorite timesink. I wonder what historians will write about all this in a hundred years’ time?