Twitter is Dead. Long Live Twitter. (2008)

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I.

Sixteen years ago this month, Shaquille O’Neal logged on to a nascent website, typed six words prefaced by a stray comma, and altered the public discourse.

Shaq was one of the first celebrities to log on to Twitter. He didn’t know what Twitter was until he was told there was a fake Shaquille O’Neal account on Twitter, which foreshadowed the degradation of a website that is now driven by charlatans and bots and verified con artists. Fifteen years later, the idea of athletes and celebrities speaking directly to their audience in short bursts, often punctuated by marooned commas, is now benignly commonplace. Meanwhile, Shaq became even more famous than he already was, which is probably why he continues to star in roughly 30 percent of the commercials that air during 11 p.m. Seinfeld re-runs. (I still have no idea what exactly The General is selling me on, but I’d like to think it involves arm wrestling.)

Shaq, of course, had the advantage of being a very large and incredibly charming human being. And for a time, Shaq-era Twitter felt kind of like a charming new way of communicating; it was a bare-bones site that forced you to learn the language of @’s and RTs. It became a driving force for media, and particularly for sports media, to communicate and to promote themselves. But over time, it simplified the dialogue, by sheer virtue of its character limit; there was no way to convey complex ideas over the course of 140 characters, or even 280 characters. It turns out Twitter wasn’t real at all.

Twitter never really felt like it was even supposed to be a primary form of communication. It just kind of happened. It was a novelty idea that became a fundamental arm of communication for athletes and fans and journalists and the entire sports ecosystem, including Shaq. But then, over time, the organic nature of it disappeared. Twitter became a marketing tool, and eventually it become a political tool, and now it is a cesspool, where it is nearly impossible to either promote one’s own work outside of Twitter, or to have a civil conversation about anything.

As I write this, Shaq’s most recent tweet to more than 15 million followers is not some quirky observation about pancakes, but a promotional advertisement for a gambling website. In the end, Twitter made things worse for all of us.

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II.

So now a new thing is happening. It is called BlueSky, and I guess the hope is that it is Twitter without the baggage. Here’s the thing, though: It works in the exact same way as Twitter. It is not a new concept at all, except that it is not driven by ads and it is not owned by a wildly rich megalomaniac and populated by Russian trolls and abusive and misogynistic dirtbags. Over the course of time, many of us in the media had become functionally addicted to Twitter; the justification was that we needed it to do our jobs properly, but we also just needed the fix that a retweet or viral tweet provided. We were chasing a dopamine rush while living inside a run-down flophouse. (Also, we’re writers, and procrastination is a fundamental element of our occupation.)

There is a kind of freshness to being on BlueSky, as I am now (there’s nothing like a self-promotional link in a newsletter decrying the self-promotional aspects of social media). Some of that may be because it’s much easier to block the kind of content that you don’t want to see every day, though you can make the argument, as

The Bulwark

writer Tim Miller does, that this is merely a way to quarantine ourselves from the kind of vile content that got us here in the first place. But that is not my biggest concern about moving from Twitter to BlueSky; it’s that the fundamental concept of what we’re doing hasn’t changed at all. The medium is still the message. And because of that, we’re not really changing the discussion at all.

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III.

The other day, my former Akron Beacon Journal colleague of roughly a thousand years ago, Brian Windhorst, went on a podcast and lamented how the coverage of professional basketball had changed. The media that covered the NBA—many of whom have driven the conversation on Twitter for years now—were “in a bad place,” Windhorst said. Arguments about big teams in major cities, Windhorst said, were what his employer at ESPN wanted, because arguments and soundbites were what drove the entire conversation. But the nuance was gone. And the noise of a social-media driven world was overwhelming, to the point that many people have tuned out of nearly everything, often to catastrophic effect.

Why, Windhorst asked, shouldn’t ESPN be the one driving the conversation? Why shouldn’t they spend more money on profiling athletes that people might not know about, and diving deeper into the league’s narratives? Why shouldn’t they be telling more in-depth stories that might get lost amid the frenetic pace of a culture that has essentially come to mimic Twitter itself over the course of the past 15 years? “Instead of following the crowd,” Windhorst said, “let's lead and try to get the crowd.”

It isn’t easy to get a major conglomerate to think outside the box, especially in an era when everyone is angry and everyone in charge is nervous about everything. The medium is still the message, and migrating from Twitter to BlueSky isn’t going to change that. (Even Substack, while offering a conduit to more substantial content, also includes its Notes function, whose idiotic algorithm tends to direct me to people who are giving advice on gaining more subscribers for a newsletter that seems to only be about gaining more subscribers.) The truth is that Twitter has dominated our thoughts and re-wired our brains for so long that the only way to get out of it is to hope that some smart person invents a new method of communication that transcends social media and alters the quality of online conversation itself. Until then, I guess I have no choice. I’ll see you on the new version of Twitter that isn’t actually Twitter.

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