I’m doing the thing now where, when faced with uncertainty around the future of Twitter, I have returned to my newsletter as some sort of backup/emotional support animal.
So of course all I want to do is reminisce abut the golden days of Twitter.
It seemed like such a good idea at the time
A couple of months ago I had a reunion in Wellington with some of my old workmates from the television programme I used to work on. And weirdly enough, among all the things that you talk about when you haven’t seen someone for a decade, one of the things people kept mentioning to me was “YOU WERE RIGHT ABOUT TWITTER!!!!”
(This is so embarrassing.)
But yeah, ten years ago, Twitter was new and exciting and I was extremely enthusiastic about it even though most people could not understand why anyone would want to post updates of their mundane life.
At the reunion, one of my old workmates said I’d talked about how with Twitter you could tweet stuff like “The Johnsonville train is running late”, useful information to share with others. This was very much in line with that crowd sourcing/internet of things ideology that was big at the time.
Back in this early era, I was so enamoured with the idea of using Twitter for these useful updates that I once tweeted this:
To be clear, I had been walking along Willis Street, saw a banana on the footpath and tweeted a warning about it. I did not stop to pick up the banana and throw it in a rubbish bin or even just kick it to the side. Instead I tweeted about it.
This was not a joke tweet. I genuinely felt I was providing a useful public service. I cannot explain this behaviour, other than I was very excited about the potential of Twitter.
Even worse, the link in the tweet went to a photo of the actual banana, so that interested parties could identify the exact banana on Willis Street. No, not that discarded banana, this one.
Disappointingly, the image is no longer available because it was uploaded via Image Shack who deleted all free uploaded pics back in 2016.
But because it is 2022, here is an AI generated photo of a banana on a footpath. I hate it because it literally looks like the sort of photo I would have taken in the Flickr era.
But now what is Twitter? No one does banana updates anymore. When I look at my Twitter timeline, most of the tweets aren’t even from people I’ve followed, they’re from other people that Twitter thinks I would be interested in.
And this is partly because the people I’ve been following for over a decade aren’t tweeting all that much anymore. But it’s also because the algorithm.
There’s also the fact that I get the worst twitter ads. Even Facebook and Instagram — which notoriously can no longer target ads as precisely as they used to — still manages to serve me interesting ads for products I would actually want to buy (and sometimes I have!). But my Twitter ads are all about business news and data technology which makes me think I must be in the miscellaneous leftover demographic.
It all feels a bit broken, but not in the way that something has dramatically, suddenly gone wrong. More that it’s just been getting old and tired.
I’m not ready to fully pull the plug on Twitter now, but it’s definitely at the stage where it’s just not as lively and enjoyable as it used to be.
So! This is my state of Twitter update. I don’t want to make this a Twitter newsletter and I promise that I will return to my usual content of pain au chocolat, dumb music videos and places I have been.
Ok, thank u.