We all spent 2023 huddled round a deathbed, waiting for its raving occupant to finally gasp their last so we could get on with the business of finding a suitable heir. But in spite of it all, Twitter staggers on. Barely.
That is, it must be said, quite remarkable. Twitter has had what business experts generally refer to as a suboptimal year, what with its owner's regular tête-à-têtes with the far-right and that time he took to the stage to tell fleeing advertisers like Apple and Disney to "go fuck [themselves]" (advertising is responsible for about 90% of Twitter's revenue). The fact that the site is billions of dollars in debt and regularly collapses under its own weight is also, as I understand it, not great.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022—after trying very hard to not buy Twitter in 2022—he chatted a great deal of lofty blather about his goals. As the world's "de facto town square," the platform would become a free speech wild west, a place for the unfettered exchange of ideas where moderation was light and no cow was sacred. Plus, he was going to beat back the armies of bots that, so it was said, hammered the site's servers day after day.
Now bots are worse than ever, and Twitter was reported to have approved 83% of censorship requests by authoritarian governments under Musk's rule back in May. Meanwhile, every moderately popular tweet is undergirded by usually dull-witted replies from the platform's pool of bluechecks: those users who fork out $8 a month to get a tick next to their name and their replies artificially boosted to the top of threads, while beneath them lurks an army of spammers flogging print-on-demand T-shirts, crypto scams, and OnlyFans subscriptions.
Plus, the advertisers who have stepped into the void left by Apple, Disney, Ubisoft and the like seem to consist largely of bots inscrutably tweeting their own name, which is the best part of the entire site right now.
It's what's happening
I know what you're thinking: Why does any of this rolling clownshow matter to PC Gamer dot com? You come here to read reviews and get your Gorbachevs ranked, dammit, not to hear about what happened with some rinky-dink and eternally collapsing social media website in 2023.
Well, it matters because Twitter is important. To gaming too. Yes, I hate to say it as much as you hate to hear it, but the fact is the site is still my go-to for breaking news, to follow journalists and academics, and to see the funniest and smartest people in the world be funny and smart for free. For games in particular, it's still the first place I check in the morning to see what the day's news is, it's where devs congregate and journos network, it's where studios post their templated apologies and where modders post about their creations.
If you have any professional or personal interest in what this industry is doing, whether positive or negative, it can be difficult to look away.
Twitter is where I can go to see Josh Sawyer tweet his thoughts on Baldur's Gate 3, to see what Swen Vincke actually meant to say on stage at The Game Awards, to see the latest corporate templated apology for a busted patch or broken launch. Even beyond that, the site has been a major influence on games for over a decade now. Disco Elysium—our current number one PC game of all time—cites it as both an influence and a competitor, while the sheer number of games whose writing or humour is clearly inflected by the rhythms and memes of Twitter discourse are too many to count.
It's where every dark part of this industry and subculture finds expression, too. Let's not forget that Twitter is for some corners of the internet a tool to coordinate and carry out harassment, another thing which has worsened—but which certainly did not begin—over the last year and a bit. If you have any professional or personal interest in what this industry is doing, whether positive or negative, it can be difficult to look away.
So even though the site is losing users under Musk, most of us are still strapped in. Simple inertia means none of us want to leap overboard until all of us do, which means even as the floodwaters rise and our mentions become filled with cryptofascists and crypto fascists, we're still in our seats. I killed off my Facebook years ago, but you can still find me @joshuawolens. At least when the site works.
So let's make a deal, you and me. Let's make 2024 the year we kill Twitter for good.
Too many characters
Have you ever heard of the Abilene paradox? It's the name for the phenomenon where a group of people embark on a course of action that none of them actually want, and I'm pretty sure it's what everyone still on Twitter is stuck in right now. I don't think I've ever seen the site as animated as it was when Musk floated the idea earlier this year of charging users to tweet. Finally, we all seemed to think, something to force us all to make the jump away from Twitter at once, rather than waiting indefinitely for everyone else to go first.
Let's hope he either goes through with it or sells the site, because I'm pretty sure we're all going to end up sticking around like frogs in boiling water unless some kind of hard, concrete barrier is actually put in front of us at this point, just letting every new awful thing crust into place around us while we focus on whatever's left that's still interesting or funny or true. But those things can be interesting, funny, or true on any number of competing services (find me on Hive! Remember Hive?) with the advantage that they aren't afloat in a sea of sexbots, Nazis, and one big, billionaire manchild.
