The trouble with being Twitter

It’s been a rather humiliating couple of weeks for Twitter. First, it went up for sale. Second, no one’s buying. Third, Salesforce — who, let’s be real, has no business buying Twitter in the first place — became the most likely buying candidate.

And fourth, adding insult to injury, they eventually said no.

It’s one thing to have Google, Apple, and Disney to say no to you, but Salesforce? No offense (they make a great product that serves their customers very well), but the only way to go is up.

All of this makes me sad. I work in digital media, therefore I am a media type, and media types love Twitter. I enjoy Instagram, but I am also bookish, and therefore not a particularly visual person. On Twitter, I get news, articles for my reading list, and commentary from media types. I get 140-character jokes on Twitter, from regular comedians as well as those comedy accounts tailor-made for the platform.

Twitter and the chamber of echoes

Of course, there’s no doubt that Twitter has problems. On a macro level, it has been frequently used for some pretty vile hate speech, the kind that drove the Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones off it. It’s also borne witness to commentators (and trolls) who seize upon a semi-public figure’s minor gaffe and blow it completely out of proportion.

On a micro level, Twitter for me has morphed into a sort of personal echo chamber. With my friends having largely stopped using it, I’m not sure anyone even reads my tweets—let alone reply to them. It’s just me, tweeting into space. Which I still do; it’s just way less fun. And that is a red flag: social networks are only good if people’s real-life social networks are in it. (A discussion for another time: maybe Twitter isn’t a social network in the vein of Facebook.)

For all its setbacks, Twitter occupies a relatively prominent place in modern culture. This is the platform where the Arab Spring’s early days played out. This is a platform responsible for a significant chunk of Donald Trump’s newsworthiness. And, of course, everyone who is everyone has a verified Twitter account: the Kardashians, star athletes, brands. Even aggregations of tweet embeds have become a widely acceptable form of content (and not just on BuzzFeed).

Social networks are only good if people’s real-life social networks are in it.

Surely all of these show that people (and brands! Don’t forget the brands!) find value in tweets, whether it is producing or consuming them. And surely if there is such value, then Twitter should be able to, you know, monetize them in some way?

Maybe, but maybe not. Advertising always seems the most obvious answer to questions of profit model, but people hate ads, and the ROI is usually lower than we think. And, compared to Google and Facebook, ads haven’t worked as well for Twitter—it’s certainly not doing well enough to prevent the company’s sale.

These days, you either have to go huge (Google, Facebook) or go niche (basically every podcast that exists) to succeed in the advertising game. Twitter is stuck somewhere in the middle. Its user growth has stalled. And while there are an inordinate number of people who consume tweets without becoming registered Twitter users, they don’t matter to the advertisers.

Has Twitter had its day? Photo credit: Karunakar Rayker/CC BY 2.0.

Where’s the money, honey?