A little while ago, Twitter only stored our last 20 tweets and discarded the previous ones. When they stopped being that much ephemeral, no one noticed.
A few years ago (eek a decade) when a lot of the tech community hung out on slashdot and I remember seeing this same thing happen. We are social creatures and before tweeting (I know shocking) there was other ways and there will be new ways when no one tweets anymore.
> it's very rare that there's a reply or conversation in even 1% of them
The interaction we used to see on Twitter is largely dead as well. Few people with followings in the thousands will engage with someone outside their small circle. Many block for trivial reasons. It's not what it was a decade ago.
I do wonder, if Twitter hadn't gone psycho on the twitter clients, if this problem would have been solved. Twitter stopped most development on this issue for anyone outside Twitter.
To be fair, the importance of those tweets in shaping the public conversation might also die because of that. In the high old days era of the 2010s I could go and read what interesting people were thinking about today on Twitter. Now if I pick a random account I know is active I see what they were saying in 2022 for some reason.
They're relying very heavily on their existing network of users if that is not some weird thing that only affects me. I'd assume most readers don't create accounts.
I think we lost that when public figures started having to answer for their old tweets. Interestingly, that only happened because enough people bought into the original idea for it to become a permanent thing.
Twitter was too busy navel gazing and pushing PR about how they had the ability to incite revolutions.
They were afraid to grow beyond tweets. In life you need to grow or die. Ten years from now, they'll be fondly remembered as the AOL Instant Messenger of the 2010s.
How could you have known in 2009 how the dynamics of twitter would evolve over the next decade? There's no way. I've used twitter since 2008 and if you told me then that 7 years later that the US presidents would be using it as their primary communication platform with the public I wouldn't believe you.
For most of Twitter's existence, it was a fantastic source of real-time information about rapidly-changing events. Many organizations used it to distribute urgent information, and it was totally reasonable for users to rely on that.
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