Knock Knock Twitter…Threads Is The New Social In Town
July 2023
I joined Twitter in June of 2009. I was at the Velocity Conference in Santa Clara that year. The conference had been in San Jose the previous year and was making the move to the convention center for the first time. I was sitting in a presentation called “Fixing Twitter”, which was a really incredible insider's point of view of service reliability issues the platform had been experiencing.
I have to admit that while I had heard about Twitter, I honestly didn’t think it was the right place for me at the time. It was mostly socialites and early influencers writing cheeky comments. Who wanted to micro-blog when you could write a 1000 word essay on software engineering that maybe 100 friends and colleagues would glance at three weeks after you posted? Well, at least that’s what I was thinking before I joined the platform.
I noticed every presenter keenly posted their Twitter handle. Nearly every presentation had a unique hashtag, plus a hashtag for the conference. I immediately signed-up in the middle of the Twitter presentation, which I found pretty ironic at the time. Within seconds I was watching a ton of fellow conference attendees post their thoughts, screen grabs and commentary about the presentation and the conference. I was sold!
Of course I had to copy what they were doing at VelocityConf in July at our annual Blackboard Conference, BbWorld ‘09. I didn’t go full blast on the hashtag and TweetMachine, but I dipped my toes a bit. Mostly I was following other technologists and members of the Blackboard community. It was a small, insulated echochamber of things that were important to me at the time, which was web performance, java development, Blackboard and software architecture.
It’s funny that I never saw LinkedIn as a social community. I saw it as a very transactional platform. I maintained my profile. I connected or better yet collected connections mainly from work colleagues (past and present), friends from my undergrad (Georgetown) and graduate (Hopkins) programs, vendors, neighbors and the occasional family member. Rarely did I post something on LinkedIn the way I would engage with Twitter.
Like most folks have experienced, Twitter changed for me in 2015 before the 2016 presidential election. What had been mostly my adjacent professional network slowly morphed into this all encompassing cornucopia of all things social. I found myself following and posting about technology, consumer goods, sports, my kids/wife, my writing and of course the most immediate topic of the time, US politics.
That period from 2016 to 2022 (pre-Elon purchase) was a crazy time on Twitter. It was like watching a train wreck daily. Sometimes you would see five or fifty-five train wrecks in a day. It was addictive. It was mood changing. To be quite honest, it was a bit depressing. I didn’t quite understand the phrase “doom scrolling” until three years after it was coined. Once I did, I found myself taking long breaks from the platform.
Like many, I’ve tried several Twitter clones over the past year. The platform hasn’t been all that enjoyable to me in many years. As many of the companies and users I’ve followed over the years have abandoned the platform, so too has the lure of participating. None have been worthy of more than a post or two before abandoning.
My social engagement has been limited to a few minutes of LinkedIn scrolling every other day. I glance at Facebook to see “Memories on this Day” and then I shut it immediately. Instagram has become my favorite. It’s become more about my personal interests and less about my professional interests. I mostly follow accounts about Dogs, Food, Golf, Swimming and funny memes. I also follow a collection of accounts from Twitter that abandoned the platform this past year.
Today I joined Meta’s new Twitter rival called Threads. I’m thankful Meta branded it under Instagram versus Facebook. It’s a tiny nod to the world that has moved past the archaic social network. I, like many, have been waiting for another player to dethrone Twitter. The fact that I’m writing a SubStack post tells you that I feel different about this rival than any other rival social network before.
I haven’t decided to abandon Twitter yet. I will monitor it and see if the traffic starts to move. I imagine my engagement will decline even more. Right now I look at Twitter daily for about 3 to 5 minutes. During my peak, I might have opened Twitter 10 to 20 times a day and spent 7 to 10 minutes each visit. As I said earlier, it was an addictive platform.
I’m hoping Threads officially becomes my Twitter replacement. For now my profile is private. Both my Facebook and Instagram profiles are private. I haven’t decided if I will open it up or not yet. I’ll make that decision if Threads becomes the real deal.
In the meantime, I look forward to engaging my readers on Substack, LinkedIn and now Threads. I plan to share my posts, like this one on Threads, going forward knowing that they are not going to suppress the links like Twitter. I hope to see you there with me!