Midweek Update: Twitter in Freefall
How to lose billions in 240 characters or less.
Apologies for being absent the past couple of weeks, but you’ll likely be seeing a lot more of me here now that Twitter is collapsing. I’ve been a Twitter addict for over a decade now, although I would liken the habit to smoking in that it’s not healthy and anyone who’s addicted would tell you never to start in the first place. The only difference is that smoking arguably makes you look cool and Twitter just ruins your mental health and possibly your reputation.
I thought about making my longer Sunday piece about my thoughts on Twitter, but there’s really no shortage of op-eds regarding how Elon Musk is driving the social networking site off a cliff (my fave belongs to Nilay Patel over at The Verge). I don’t really have much to add other than while Twitter was already beset with countless problems it never could figure out how to address, and Musk’s leadership will inevitably make the site worse. His recent decisions (tweeting a conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi, drastically cutting staff while overworking those who remain, etc.) are so horrendous and counterproductive that I can’t help but feel like this is a Producers-like scam where he essentially shorts the company and wins by losing. Ultimately, the financial machinations at his level are irrelevant. Twitter will die, Musk will remain wealthy beyond reason, and the world will continue to spin.
For my own part, I’m torn about Twitter’s demise. On the one hand, I think the site is ultimately bad and, moreover, it’s built to be bad. While we can talk all day about content moderation and guiding vision, you have to look at the shape of the thing. Twitter was built to be 120 characters and ultimately increased to 240 characters, but its constrained length removes any room for nuance, which is conducive to conflict. You can attempt to do long threads, but then you’ve only returned to blogging but without the benefit of being able to earn money from your thoughts by hosting ads (granted Google ate up the whole ad market anyway, but outside of Twitter’s recent “Tip Jar” feature, the only way to make any money would be sponsored content, and other social networks—namely Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok—are more conducive to that because again, Twitter is about conflict).
And yet Twitter could also make for some good comedy. There’s something special about someone who’s able to tweet something goofy or satirical with such limited space. It was also a nice way to showcase comic voices who didn’t necessary get in the spotlight. I’m willing to bet that if you follow someone on Twitter who’s consistently funny, they’re probably in a writers room of some sitcom or late night talk show.
But even these people get churned up in the conflict machine, and the machine has nothing to teach us. I may have found some interesting people through Twitter, but we all tweeted non-stop through the Trump Administration and it didn’t end that nightmare a single minute early (regardless of some numbskulls breathlessly tweeting that the hammer was going to drop any day now). Real activism happens in public and in person because those bonds matter more than some dashed-off thought you had while waiting in line at Starbucks.
As Twitter comes to its conclusion, it will be interesting to see how the social media space transforms. YouTube seems relatively stable thanks to being a part of Google and the basic need to search for information, TikTok is unquestionably on the rise, but Facebook seems to be slipping as Zuckerberg puts all his chips on owning the Metaverse, and Instagram (by virtue of being part of Meta) always seems like it will be on rocky footing. For my part, I’ll be doing more here on Substack, but I’m also flirting with podcasting and possibly doing something with TikTok or my personal YouTube, but it all comes down to how much I want to create content. It’s not about money as much as my desire to simply create, so we’ll see how that goes. At the very least, I feel like Substack is a more stable platform than whatever Twitter will devolve into.
What I’m Watching
I went all in on Hooptober for the past six weeks, a challenge with certain parameters for horror movies to watch. I can’t say I would do it again. It’s great if you can’t get enough of horror movies so you need some really deep cuts and/or you don’t know where to start in the genre and need a little push, but neither of those really apply to me, so I just ended up with a mixed bag of some good stuff and some real garbage. I just feel like my time would be better spent selecting the horror movies I want to watch rather than making sure I hit someone else’s specifications.
On the TV side, I’m kind of glad that Rings of Power and House of the Dragon have wrapped their first seasons. While I suppose it’s interesting to debate which expensive fantasy series was “better,” I find it interesting that they’re both season-long prologues. Things happen, but they both end at The War. Streaming incentivizes a lot of table setting, so you essentially watched 8-10 episodes of battle lines being drawn and alliances being forged. Again, you can argue which show did it better, but I think it stunts momentum. I just started watching Andor, and I like where it’s headed, but it’s also annoying that it takes until its third episode for the story to kick into gear.
In lighter fare, my wife and I are almost done with our rewatch of 30 Rock, which was untouchable in its first five seasons (especially 2-5), and then kind of fell off a cliff in seasons six and seven, although there was still a good smattering of jokes (“How do you do, fellow kids?” is from Season 6). We’re also in the middle of Love Is Blind: Season 3, which is a guilty pleasure, but is one of many things that makes me glad to be out of the dating game (I’m sure fame factors into people applying to be on the show, but I also don’t think you go on there if you’ve just been crushing it in your dating life; at least a show like Survivor offers the chance at money). Finally, we’re almost done with the first season of Our Flag Means Death, which is incredibly charming but never quite pulls me along to where I need to know what happens next, and Welcome to Wrexham, which is lovely and I have to resist the urge to binge.
What I’m Reading
Still pushing through Jewish People, Jewish Thought, but I should be finally done with that by next week. Only took me six months to read it.
What I’m Hearing
I’ve fallen in love with You Must Remember This all over again. Obviously, working in classic film, a podcast about classic movies is very much my jam, but that’s not to shortchange what Karina Longworth has done. It’s a special show, and it’s a good way to guide people through classic cinema.
Also, Michael Hobbes, formerly of You’re Wrong About and currently Maintenance Phase, launched a new podcast: If Books Could Kill, which is about airport books that took the world by storm despite their shoddy premises and poor research. The first episode is about Freakonomics, a book I read in college and devoured wholesale without really thinking about it because I was 21 and wanted to believe I was smarter than I was. After listening to the first episode, I can tell the show is going to be extremely my jam.
What I’m Playing
I finished Stray, which was fine. I’m torn about whether to go back for the achievements because the game was fine. I wish it were a straight puzzler rather than having anything resembling combat. It feels like its heart is more in bittersweet melancholy rather than anything dealing with enemies.
I’ve also become addicted to Marvel Snap, a mobile card game from one of the directors of Hearthstone. Aside from the fact that I’m the gigantic dork you see before you because of Marvel trading cards I collected when I was a youth, the game is good because it’s fast paced and easy. It doesn’t feel like a play-to-win environment, and even when you lose, it’s not like you dumped a bunch of time into the match. I like playing it to kill time but I also don’t feel like I’m always going to get schooled by people who have nothing but money and free time.
And that’s it! Come back on Sunday for my piece about the Russo Brothers based on their latest Variety profile.
Extremely well done. Are you going to stop posting to Twitter?