Twitter: Where Next?

2023-02-09

Some friends who are aware of Elon’s acquistion and destruction of Twitter have asked about the value of Twitter relative to other social media like Facebook or YouTube.

This thread about the minor character Red Hair in the Conan the Barbarian movie is a good example:

• Facebook, et. al. are too private
• YouTube, et. al. force higher production content (videos) taking longer to produce / consume

This kind of content is valuable, but not valuable enough for independent publishing which bears ongoing costs. But it is a real problem worth solving. Whether it’s the right place or not, you will see research on topics like COVID and useful news reporting / analysis shared through mediums like this until an alternative is viable.

Other options include:

• Personal websites are my favorite but require effort / knowledge beyond a social media post.
• Mastodon is a federated Twitter clone but Twitter is a poor format for Twitter’s best content.
• Medium is currently great for publishing but the paywall is less awesome for readers
• Substack is similar to Medium but with more focus on e-mail and for now, less annoying.
• Ghost is less encumbered than Medium or Substack, but charges authors a monthly fee.

These options have something in common: they’re all too heavyweight for the task. Meanwhile over in Twitter-land, paying subscribers can post longer tweets. So even Twitter understands the pain point, whatever their other issues.