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It wasn’t that long ago that I—and many other people I know—would have argued that Twitter was more than just another social network. I would have told you that Twitter was more like a utility, a service so fundamental that I could imagine a scenario in which it was literally underwritten. Twitter needed to exist. A stream of those hundred-and-forty-character tweets was how you found the most crucial, critical, and thought-provoking stories of the moment.
When bombs went off during the Boston Marathon, in April of 2013, users sat glued to the feed, suddenly privy to something visceral and real, somethinghappening. And Twitter provided the view, an unedited, unscripted look into the world as it changed, through police-scanner blasts, eyewitness reports, and grainy citizen-journalist photography. It was raw, but it was streamlined.
But cracks in Twitter’s façade had been showing already. Changes to the product made it hard to follow conversations or narratives. A lack of rigor in verifying reliable sources made information suspect or confusing. More troubling was the growing wave of harassment and abuse that users of the service were dealing with—a quagmire epitomized by the roving flocks of hateful, misogynistic, and well-organized “Gamergate” communities that flooded people’s feeds with hate speech and threats.
The company seemed to be wholly unprepared to handle mob violence, with few tools at its disposal to moderate or quell uprisings. Even its beloved celebrity users couldn’t be protected. In August of 2014, Robin Williams’s daughter, Zelda, was driven offthe service after a series of vicious attacks....
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do you rely on Twitter?
As a millennial myself, I have been given a great opportunity to easily understand the growing social media age as I grow older. I have grown up with MySpace, until it died, and now I currently closely monitor my Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, just as everyone else I know does. The one difference with me, is that although I have a Twitter handle, I do not tweet, nor am I rarely on the site. This is simply a personal choice. I never truly saw the benefit of Twitter. I whole-heartedly agree that the interface and direct purpose of Twitter, of providing in-the-moment news and information is very important, but I do not agree with what it has been trying to do to the other social media world. Getting all information and news from Twitter may seem to make life easier, by making all news more concise, but I think it is simply stealing views and the purpose of other sites. The age of the newspaper is becoming more and more dead everyday, all thanks to social media in general, but Twitter is the one social media site that one of its main purpose is to generate views of news.
Twitter is slowly dying now, mostly because the excitement of a new social media site is dying down. the big next "thing" will come into play, and Twitter will be a thing of the past, just like MySpace.
Other social media sites, such as Facebook and Instagram, offer more than just one product, more than just 140 character thought. Until Twitter can figure out how to offer more, possibly following the minds of WeChat, it will not stay relevant.