Okay, here’s an analogy. Twitter is a swimming pool. A large pool, an Olympic-sized pool. It’s privately owned, but open to the public.
People come. Some just want to splash around, some want to swim laps, some just want to hang out poolside, some want to train for a swim meet, some want to cannonball into the pool and make a big splash, some want to practice diving. It’s a big pool, so even if some jackass is playing Nickleback on a bluetooth speaker instead of using headphones, you can move to the other end where it’s less annoying. It’s far from perfect, but you still come because it’s the biggest pool around and all your friends hang out there.
The pool has a few loose rules. You break the rules, you can get your ass booted out of the pool. One of the fundamental rules: Keep Litter Out of the Pool. Nobody wants to swim in a pool that has old candy wrappers and cigarette butts floating around in it.
That’s Old Twitter. New Twitter is different.
New Twitter is owned by a rich, arrogant, bone-ignorant narcissist who thought it would be fun to own his own swimming pool. To save money, he’s fired the concession stand workers, the maintenance workers, and the lifeguards. He also feels some folks who’ve been evicted for littering were treated unfairly. He feels they contribute to the swimming pool community, that perhaps the litter makes swimming more challenging and immediately vital.
So he’s re-invited them back.
Now, feeling vindicated for littering, they’re gleefully shitting in the pool.
And the new owner suggests folks who are reluctant to swim in the pool now aren’t really committed to swimming.
gregfallis.com 
And while the new owner spent an obscene amount of money to but the pool, he also picked up, for free, and index card of information for everyone who came to the pool, even if they just took one look around and walked back out again. That is the real tresure.
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One of the many many sad things about New Twitter is that it’s no longer a safe tool for people in authoritarian states to promote pro-democracy or anti-government protests. People who organize those protests already use alternate venues, but Twitter was great for disseminating information to the masses.
That’s gone now.
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They’re welcome to their shit-filled pool. Twitter felt toxic to me the first time I dipped my toes in the water and I never bothered with it. Now it just seems utterly revolting.
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I felt the same way when I first got a Twitter account. I didn’t use it at all for several years. Eventually I discovered it was useful for following breaking news — so it became my go-to venue for national tragedies.
Later I discovered niche Twitters (I’m not sure what else to call them). If you have an interest in almost any subject, there are people on Twitter who share that interest. Crow Twitter, mortuary symbolism Twitter, black STEM Twitter, squid Twitter, Dorothy Dunnett Twitter, bollard Twitter — just a few of the special Twitters I follow. I’ll miss them very much when I finally leave.
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Yes, I can understand that, and I sympathise with those who are losing something valuable. I use both Facebook and Instagram in the same way, while simultaneously despising the mechanics (and people) behind them. But they have become my substitutes for the bulletin boards of the old days. Oh, and of course, there’s always Reddit if you want to go more hardcore investing in ‘interests’.
One of my biggest problems with Twitter from the get-go, though, was the brevity of messaging – the figurative ‘tweets’ of information/gossip/opinion. I surmised very early on that this would get a lot of people into trouble, and it really has. A great many people have trouble expressing themselves in writing, and this is amplified when you are trying to get your message into a few hundred characters. It never appealed to me as anything much above the literal twittering of sparrows, I have to say.
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Greg, you have a way with analogy.
“Now, feeling vindicated for littering, they’re gleefully shitting in the pool.”
Except for that guy who is getting paid to exclusive-shit (allegedly) in a different pool, the guy the new owner thought would really bring back the rubes
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Assuming Twitter survives until the next presidential campaign season, I suspect we’ll see that guy ‘reluctantly’ return. Another reason for Twitter to burn to the ground.
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I haven’t verified, but I read he’s in some kind of non-compete contract with “Truth”. Allegedly he’s getting paid for confining his tweet-like posts to that site, with re-posts allowed after some days. If true, he’d lose money if he Twitters. The guy is not visibly frugal but isn’t above holding out for a bigger bribe.
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