A Remembrance for Twitter

I remember telling people that we live in a golden age. From four hundred and fifty million people, you can select the ones that you most admire, and casually subscribe to their daily thoughts. You could read any written work, find the author's twitter handle, and immediately tap into their social network. You could wake up every morning and receive handwritten letters from the world's giants and legends. Never in history has it happened before. For me at least, Twitter and Youtube completely revolutionised self-education.

As a concrete example of this, and the reason that I created a twitter profile in the first place: if you search Google Images on technical topics, invariably the results would lead to twitter posts from experts on that topic. Follow that person, and follow who they follow, and instantly you created a curated feed on a niche technical topic. This created a network effect: if you want to be discovered, you should post on twitter. Discoverers and discoverees converged.

Alas, in October 2022, that all changed. Don't get me wrong. Twitter had its ups and downs. I remember twitter users complaining about the platform all the time. However, there was one general truth that you could rely on: if a viral post made if in front of your eyeballs, it wasn't because someone paid for it to be there.

There used to be a clear separation of advertisements and organic tweets. Now the feed is polluted. I have to filter every tweet to discern if this is something promoted in my interests, or if my time is being siphoned into unpaid impression-farming. Almost by definition, the people who want to pay for my attention are not the ones I want to listen to. I have no interest in astro-turfing your paid viral content.

I decided to write this down because it's something that I think about now and again. I hope the conversations find a new home.