If there was one thing we could complain about on Twitter, it was your glacial speed to add changes: Twitter Blue has been running for a year and still hasn’t left the four countries where it debuted. The editing of tweets came after years of being demanded by users. The green circle became massive after many months arriving in drops. The super follow they go the two years without leaving the United States. We tend to go a long time without any news, and when there are, they are often not universal.
Now instead we can expect almost instantaneous changes and novelties, to the rhythm that its new CEO has accustomed us to in the same position he holds in four other companies. Elon Musk, a visionary of the time with excessive pretensions and too much clapping for his own good, has already taken over the keys to Twitter. And his first moves, beyond showing little empathy with those who have built the empire that he has bought, also point to another nail in the coffin of the timid on the Internet.
Less prose and more Reels
Twitter is the last great stronghold for lovers of the written word. The Internet has been filled with platforms governed by algorithms that prevail the choreographies, the hyperbole and the necklines. Where do you go, upstart youtuber, without a gaping thumbnail?
I accidentally ended up in the “Torredembarra” tag on Instagram.
I couldn’t help but compare the results (filter: popularity) with what was the photography social network par excellence: Flickr.
The difference is starry.
The conclusions are many. And none flattering. pic.twitter.com/rQdrrUGuit– Ismael Peña-López (@ictlogist) August 17, 2020
On Twitter we keep a little space free from having to look at the camera, Let’s not even talk about carantoñas and dancing giving pain at our age. The important thing is what you communicate with your written words, something that stopped being too important with Facebook, disappeared with Instagram and doesn’t even have space on TikTok. LinkedIn is doing its thing and anthropologists will study in due course how this necronomicon of positions in English was formed. On Twitter we can dream of creating connections with like-minded people without much more than the casual and natural exchange of ideas.
After a decade of irregular leadership and strange decisions that despite everything have not ended with itself, Twitter gave wings to this type of user. He bought Revue and promoted the newsletters, announced a commitment to the creation of longer texts, strengthened the creation of threads as its own format and even its audiovisual commitment was a hug for the timid: the spaces they would be voice rooms, without video. Beatific smile.
Musk, who does not like transcendental literature, but only capital, does not see it the same way. Casey Newton, editor of Platformer, has already advanced that Revue will die in less than two months, its long text format, Notes, will be paused indefinitely; and that he is going to work on the relaunch of Vine.
Vine was a really fun, original and innovative network; and also, due to its video nature, much more potentially viralizable and monetizable. The text is far from it.
Musk also announced on the —Spanish— night of Saturday a new possibility to add long texts and thus avoid the screenshots of note applications, but if Revue and Notes have sentenced their destiny, there is not much room to think that this is going to be a solution to avoid an absurd format (those screenshots), not so much to give creative wings to who prefer that format.
Online money in this era is in the video and the text is outcasts. Facebook found out about it and stuffed us with tear-jerking clips with cello music and intermittent subtitles until it was unbearable and it was revealed that they inflated their own metrics (and the media ran to get a slice, ahem). Instagram knew it and from a mobile photography social network it has become a filmed posture social network. TikTok knew it and has grown like none of its predecessors.
Musk’s era at the helm of Twitter begins with changes aimed at triggering billing. There are no newsletters or long texts, but Vine does
Musk knows it too, and those of us who have a newsletter at Revue have already started to organize the move; to give to unfollow to that promising account called TwitterWrite and to rehearse a funny greeting in front of the mirror before letting out a “how pathetic” under his breath.
We have finished the day removing from the Amazon cart the sony alpha mirrorless and thinking that something will come out, that the future will smile at us again, that if we survive the goodbye of slash, we will survive this.
And in the end we are overwhelmed by this strange feeling of nostalgia about something that hasn’t even finished happening but already seems inevitable. The nostalgia for a better life, in which those of us who managed to build a certain online community only had First World Problems (“Has Medium finally released that crappy redesign or not? Should I go for shorter paragraphs?”). It doesn’t look like any massive platform is going to shelter us anytime soon. At least one writes in Xataka. It’s the market, man.
