I keep wondering how long people are going to stay attached to Twitter. Every few days the company does something to degrade the usefulness of the platform, and yet many nonetheless choose to keep using it. The latest move was blocking likes and retweets on tweets containing links to Substack content. Blocking works the other way, too, as Substack writers can no longer embed tweets in their posts, which many frequently do.
My lady friend spends a good deal of her internet time on Twitter. She swore that she would leave when Elon Musk acquired the company, but that turned out to be an empty threat. Meanwhile, I’m mulling over this post:
Reading all the wondering on why people still use Twitter seems redundant. If you speak to anyone outside of tech or news circles that uses Twitter, they don’t care who owns the company.
It still provides what it has done for more than a decade and until it dies completely will continue to do so.
Ultimately, I think Greg is right. As long as the basic experience doesn’t change, people are going to stay hooked on a decaying social network.
