It’s a new year, and with twitter still operating as usual I’d like to preemptively declare victory on my prediction that Twitter will not die in the next year. I’ll still have a full update on the 1 year anniversary of that post, but I think we have had enough time to at least take stock of things.

First I’d like to lay some ground rules. There was definitely a lot of misplaced hyperbole surrounding Elon Musk’s purchase of twitter. A number of articles about how the platform was dying, or unsafe. Some semi-major journalism outlets like CBS news even left twitter (for about a day, before rejoining). But a common defense mechanism for people who are publicly wrong is the “I was only joking” defense aka Schrodinger’s douchebag. I want to be clear that a lot of organizations like CBS were definitely acting like twitter would implode any minute, and so it’s important to note why these people were very wrong and what we can learn from this.

First note: is twitter dying because advertisers are fleeing it? Hard to say because advertisers are fleeing all companies right now. Advertisers fleeing Facebook (in the midst of a pandemic-related recession) didn’t stop that company from reaching a valuation of 1 trillion not long after, so stories about certain advertisers fleeing twitter aren’t really informative. At any time, with any company, you can always find some advertisers fleeing a platform, sometimes it says a lot more about the advertisers (losing money, can’t afford) than the platform (still growing). Considering the fact that the US economy is still not doing good (growth is expected to be zero or negative in 2023), then it’s natural that advertisers are fleeing twitter just as they are fleeing google advertisement. So without evidence that more advertisers are fleeing Twitter than are currently fleeing google and Facebook/Meta, then we can’t declare the death of twitter any more than we can declare the death of the other tech giants.

Second note: did twitter’s codebase collapse? Not at all, it still works fine. In the wake of thousands of firings of software engineers, some asked whether the software that underpins twitter wouldn’t collapse soon after. This seems like a farcical suggestion to me, a well run company should only put software into production if the code is ready for prime-time. If the code needs daily maintenance to sustain basic functionality, then it should be in testing not in the hands of users. The suggestion that twitter would collapse soon after it’s exodus of engineers was implicitly a suggestion that the company was a dumpster fire of near-unworkable code prior to Musk’s purchase. More puzzling was that it was former engineers making these claims. I get that they were unhappy to lose their jobs and there was likely a lot of emotions running high, but if you’re implying that the code you previously were responsible for was a dumpster fire that barely hung together, then I don’t know what company would want to hire you afterwards. Most tech companies try to have higher standards.

It’s too early to tell if twitter truly is dying, we’ll have better data next year on user totals and engagement. Certainly Musk’s freewheeling personality could be scaring off both advertisers and users, but some could also be drawn to it like a car crash. Whatever the eventual result, it’s clear that the short-term predictions of doom were widely off the mark (just as I said previously)