Why did Twitter / X end up as the social media platform used for communication of serious news? Take the numerous threads on this board as an example. The Ukraine war thread, the various thread about the war in the Middle East, the thread on1/6/2021 when it was happening, and so on. Other than old fashioned web sites, most of the cites from the news media or those involved directly in the event itself were from Twitter / X. Of course it’s not just this board. On ESPN, whenever there’s an athletic event of note and other athletes or coaches comment on it, the quotes are always from X. It’s almost never a Facebook post, or a TikTok, or any of whatever newer social media platforms the kids these days use. I could point out many other examples, but those are good places to start. Why did it happen this way, and why is it still happening this way?
This is (sort of) incorrect. Twitter is used as the notification platform of “serious news”, but in the vast majority of instances, those notifications also include a link to drive traffic to an actual news platform. No one reads an article on Twitter - they read a headline, which directs them to the news outlet’s actual website.
And this is the case because Twitter is (or for an increasingly larger number, was) a convenient place to aggregate news sources and voices that you want to keep track of, and links back to Twitter do not require a login or account to access (despite people on the SDMB protesting Twitter links with “sorry, I don’t have a Twitter account”).
Now.
But there were experimental attempts to make that happen.
For things like the war in Ukraine, or for natural disasters currently in progress, Twitter in teh good old days was a logical way for ordinary people who happened to be caught up in it to broadcast their personal news & pics and vids. Instead of a news gathering agency having one “eyewitness reporter” on the ground, now we had millions everywhere who could report on anything and everything as it was happening.
Twitter’s secret sauce in the early days was the idea of hashtags. That anyone, not just some manager someplace, could create a new aggregation category and as other learned of it they could contribute under the same hashtag. That also enabled the other critical feature of runaway successes: that volume begets more volume and success begets more success. e.g. if a tornado hits a town and 4 people each post a tweet about it each using a different hashtag that they chose, pretty quickly by osmosis, one hashtag will have 200 posts and users and the other three will have 1 or 2. That self-curating (or at least self-organizing) feature is huge.
What we are witnessing now with the abject enshittification of X is that once such a service becomes entrenched it is very hard to move the bulk of the crowd to somewhere else.
If X shut down permanently tomorrow, some consensus alternative would emerge within a few weeks or at worst in a few months. But as long as X, in all its shittiness exists, the power of inertia for both content providers and content consumers is to stay here another day and move elsewhere later once the critical mass is there, not still here on X. So later never comes, or at least only comes very slowly and fitfully over a period of years, maybe even decades.
Lots of good points there, especially regarding the early days of crowd-sourced content and bleeding edge news.
Ain’t that the truth. I’ve seen handfuls of people I follow leave Twitter due to said enshittification. They’ve migrated mostly to BlueSky, which is I believe the current #2 Twitter-like entity out there. I’ve downloaded it, started an account, followed as many people as I could, but it just isn’t an app I use with any regularity (I believe it’s currently archived on my phone due to inactivity, meaning I’d have to download it again to use it). Inertia is most certainly Twitter’s current greatest asset on the books.
Twitter is fast and for a while there serious journalists/historians/academics hung out and discussed things. Musk has since driven a ton of people away with his open embrace of white nationalist taking points.