Oh, Twitter

I've really not wanted to write a "Twitter is dead" post, just like I no longer want to write "Gee, AI is so cool" posts. But wow, Twitter is junk. I saw somewhere (I'm so sorry - I forget who) that Twitter now discounts (makes less visible) any tweets involving links. You know what I *love* about Twitter? Discovery. I love finding something I didn't know much about.

We Keep Promoting Performative Social Media, Not Valuable Social Media

Think about that. Twitter penalizes the discoverability of tweets that contain links. That SHOULD be a valuable service. It should be the kind of thing that would make a site sticky. And yet, Mister Musk doesn't see anything that way. He's not running the site to build it. He's just.. well, what do any of us know?

I've left behind a LOT of social media tools. Twitter, my beloved, is hanging on by a thread, mostly because it's one of the only places where my Dad and I have a social media interaction. Beyond that, I used Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn. (LI having the most business value, but Reddit and YouTube providing me some of the "discovery" that I yearn for.)

And that's the thing. Twitter was the FAST marketplace. You could swing in, grab some interesting links, swing out.

Instead, Twitter wants comments. Like every other silly platform (B2B or B2C), they think the value is in the room, not the hallway.

A Room or a Hallway

Julien Smith wrote about this in The Impact Equation, a book I wrote with him after Trust Agents. I had no idea what he was on about. (This is often the case with people who are so smart, you worry that they're the advanced recon team for an alien species.) Here's what he was saying.

Would you rather be a room or a hallway? Would you rather be a destination (room) or the throughway to even more resources (hallway)? A room has a lot of benefits. It's a very self-contained, so you control the variables. A hallway means you try to collect benefits from guiding people to other places, and by linking together rooms (meaning more than one resource).

Twitter has Voted to Be a Room (And by "Voted," Elon Decided)

This is what stinks. The move to turn the Twitter API into something so expensive that many companies will stop interacting with it is bad. The move to downplay links is bad. The move to reinstate Russian accounts (especially government ones) is bad. It's all a mess.

I'm there for my Dad, but there's no real value there right now. It's a very small room with no hallways.

(Here is fine. Ish.)

Chris...