Twitter is dead, X is a cesspit, let's make 2025 the year of the message board

Twitter is dead. Almost exactly a year ago I hoped the once-upon-a-time microblog of record would have a 2024 bad enough to kill it—to finally free me from my compulsion to check in—and you know what? The year made good on my request.

Don't get me wrong. I don't mean that Twitter is dead in the sense that it doesn't continue to draw in, somehow, millions of users, or that it doesn't continue to generate some small sliver of revenue from the dullest wits on Earth forking over $8 a month to have their replies artificially boosted to the top of every single thread. I don't even mean to say that, a year or two from now, all of that won't still be true.

What I mean is that Twitter is dead because it is finally, fully X, "The Everything App." Elon's beast. Where else can you go to watch a billionaire sheepishly back down from a fight he picked with the Supreme Court of South America's largest economy? Where else can you go to continue being harassed by people you've blocked? What other service stumbles on like the restless dead in spite of an 84% revenue drop vs two years ago?

Only on X, baby

Whether Twitter was ever 'good' is one for history to judge, but I can tell you it at least used to be useful. Breaking news as it happened, fostering new contacts, networking, glimpses into communities and subcultures that would otherwise be utterly obscure to you, posts from smart people that were funny and from funny people that were smart—all this and more awaited in the tweet fields. It was a source par excellence for on-the-minute gaming news, takes from devs, and feeling like you had a finger on something resembling the pulse of 'the industry'.

There were plenty of drawbacks, of course, but the positives outweighed them, at least for me. But they've all been hollowed out by now. Breaking news? You can still find it, maybe, but there's a solid risk a bunch of it will come from some guy with a Sonnenrad avatar and be almost entirely made up. Hey, he paid his $8 to get rammed to the top of your 'For You' page and every single reply thread, and the site will be damned if he isn't going to get his money's worth.

New contacts? Networking? No. The last time I opened my DMs on the-site-that-is-now-X they consisted in no small part of alarmingly friendly women with alarmingly generic profile pictures telling me all about how they love to "make friends of the opposite sex who have suitable personalities." Thrilled as I am about my suitable personality, it kind of makes me loath to ever open my messages ever again, to say nothing of the hidden, deeper "Additional Messages" folder, which is wall-to-wall bots offering me AI nudes of anyone in the world and other assorted cons.

And those niche subcultures? A lot of them are gone now, either drowned out by that sea of bots and fascists, run off to other sites and Discord servers, or just departed from the hostile waters of social media entirely. Who can blame them? The thing that has killed Twitter and defined X, its bastard successor, is that the latter just feels icky to use. You'll think I mean the politics—and I do, a little—but there have always been far-right freaks on social media. "Ban the Nazis, Jack" was a common refrain when it was Jack Dorsey in charge, long before Musk.

Really what I mean is that there's just something gross about the actual act of scrolling on the website now. It's become dank and ichorous, like wading through the sheer, concentrated sludge of all the worst comment sections on the internet. Scam after scam after scam after AI video after crypto pump-and-dump. A pure, unmitigated firehose of slop, not suitable for human life. No wonder the advertisers are fleeing: Would you want your ad sandwiched between this trash?

I'm not even convinced the weirdo influencers like it there at this point. I'm pretty sure they just stay because they think it bothers the libs, like the guy smugly taking a chomp of a lemon in that Simpsons episode.

Greener glass, bluer skies

It wasn't like this from the jump. Even after Musk gutted Twitter's staff and replaced actual identity verification with a paid subscription service that persisted with its name despite retaining none of its function, enough of the users from the site-as-it-was stayed hanging on to maintain a flicker of its former usefulness. They ensured I kept it open while watching the latest Geoff Event and checked in throughout a workday. But they've been driven off gradually, then all at once, by mindless decision after mindless decision, and, of course, by the site owner's intervention in the US election.

A lot of them have ended up on Bluesky, which, for now, feels a lot like the Twitter of 10 years ago, much smaller population and all. Even organisations are making the jump: The Guardian killed its presence on X to commit completely to Bluesky, while even some strange outlet called 'PC Gamer' has a presence over there. Some of Twitter’s refugees presumably also went to Threads, but I'd rather die than open Threads so we'll never know for sure. It's not a bad outcome, all told: Twitter on X is dead for good, but Twitter on Bluesky has just gotten started. All the usefulness of the site I used to waste too much time on, without the bad parts of its newest incarnation.

But don't get it twisted. For all its algorithm-free feeds and lack of link-suppression and the King Cnut-like attempts of so-called 'Bluesky elders' to establish some kind of different MO for how social interaction works on the service, the site is fundamentally just pre-Musk Twitter, with all the good and bad that entails. Elon made it worse, sure, but many of the site's original sins came about as a result of cramming tens of millions of people into one forum, and no site that tries to do the same thing will be able to completely avoid its downsides. The problem with a "global town square" is it has the globe in it. You can't fix that without fixing people.

You know what hasn't degraded, suffered, and gotten worse over the last decade or so of social media boom and bust? Something Awful dot com—the venerable cornerstone of internet culture that's been around for a quarter century. With just north of 100,000 users and absolutely no desire to cram in the entire world, the forums have maintained a kind of cultural homeostasis, still funny and clever after all these years. It's not just a question of being comfortable not catering to millions of people, it's about having strong (and, paradoxically, somewhat loose—happy to ban people who make a habit of skirting rules without ever explicitly violating them) moderation. But that's easier to do when you're not policing a small country's worth of people.

So, for as much as I'm genuinely enjoying Bluesky and its nobler raison d'etre after completely moving over to it, I'm increasingly Tracer Tong about this whole social media situation. Rather than hopping from social media lilypad to social media lilypad as shareholders eat up and value-strip every last platform we develop an attachment to, and rather than taking increasing levels of psychic damage from exposure to people we never ought to have known about, let's return to forums, message boards, IRC channels—small, community-run spaces beholden only to the lunatic obsessions of a small collection of amiable weirdos, rather than to capital, the market, and billionaires. They weren't perfect either, but at least I was never scared to open my DMs.