Oddbean

I think twitter is increasingly becoming more of a LinkedIn for journalists. A place where they see each other, rather than see the world. It was always more this way, but that's the sticky part as reality recedes.

@393f4547 yes, it was always skewed towards being that, but it had a vital connection with a reality beyond that, which made it useful in other ways. And it still has potential for reaching out - I was looking at how the Austrian grocery prices scraper got picked up into mainstream media and politics, because someone saw it on Twitter last week. That's a core function which made twitter hugely useful, but it's decaying.

@b870d4c8 I feel like it's close to that critical mass of absolutely collapsing for this purpose tbh, one of the underrated things dickface fucked up with the app was breaking muscle memory that ordinary people had for logging in, doomscrolling and doomposting, and it's only going to get worse from there. I suspect journos are as distrustful of the paid subscribers as normal users are, and seeing more and more of that in use and less real people is full check-out material

@393f4547 I think you're right - but the collapse will largely come from new journalists not seeing Twitter as relevant. Existing relatively high profile journalists will stay because of sunk cost and network effects, so we'll see a slow die-off over years due to lack of replacement rather than abandonment per se.

@393f4547 @b870d4c8 I’m just sorry for those who had Twitter for sharing vital info quick and without having to “perform” like on tiktok. And had the low data option to do that. I used to follow a lot of human rights activists, some of them I know, none of them really make the “jump” to mastodon, they went back to Twitter, their best shot. They work in the GCC and the GCC is on Twitter and FB. Also Africa. They also need Europeans to be there-so Threads is out.

@b870d4c8 @393f4547 this is a very good point - the interesting thing is where the new wave of journalists go to - many will follow and continue using twitter for same reasons as their seniors do. But something else will pop up, in a way like Substack has created / and packaged a new form of content distribution (this is not an argument saying that it is better, just that it's now an established alternative platform)

@2c841a34 @393f4547 maybe nothing else will replace all the elements. Twitter emerged during a time when even having a website was a pretty new thing for journalists, let alone social media. So it could represent a kind of Standard Oil/IBM moment before an industry becomes mature.

@b870d4c8 @393f4547 yes, agree. I think there will actually be a reflection on how best to store and distribute journalistic content. Perhaps back to use of websites / blogs / newsletters, with #twitter / #X, #fediverse and #threads being considered more as distribution platforms rather than places for content creation.

@2c841a34 @393f4547 I wish I could agree, but the journalism/news media industry has just been thrashing around in a non-strategic panic for the last 20 years since Google and Facebook started to eat their lunch (advertising revenue). We might see a general collapse, because no one has developed a replacement business model.

@b870d4c8 I want add a sidebar to this conversation. Twitter has also ceased to be a usable space for many researchers, and I'm not sure any of the qualitative research CAQDAS platforms have a Twitter import function and analysis option anymore. In my CAQDAS, that was removed months ago.