The Pulse of The Planet, Flatlined: Why Twitter's Is Failing to Grow

Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization

The social media ecosystem appears to be in flux. Twitter’s rebranding to X has come to symbolize a broader reorganization of online publics – political reshuffling, user attrition, and uncertainty over the role of legacy platforms. Simultaneously, the shift from text-based, networked feeds toward algorithmically curated, short-form video has accelerated, with TikTok setting the pace for the wider ecosystem [18, 14, 16]. At the same time, everyday communication increasingly migrates from large, open networks to semi-private spaces such as group chats and messaging apps. Commentators describe a digital public sphere in transition: smaller, more fragmented, less dominated by traditional social networking sites, and rise of more broadcast-oriented forms of media – with some even suggesting that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the social media era.

Twitterlike is a Bad Shape

Twitter and its imitators have adopted a structural design that is fundamentally bad for people. This isn't just a matter of who's in charge; it's a problem with the thing itself. Forcing users to adhere to a tight character limit, discouraging link culture, preventing people from editing their own posts, steering people into sharing things they hate, incentivizing rage bait with trending feeds, subjecting people to decontextualized encounters, encouraging conflict by discouraging tags, and leaving users powerless to clean up the resulting mess—all of this is bad shape.

My 2024 thoughts on the state of social media

I see a continued fragmentation of social media as people leave X(Twitter).

Twitter and What Might Have Been

Twitter’s blog is generally a cheery place, with one big exception from 2012: the innocuously named Changes Coming in Version 1.1 of the Twitter API, and in particular, the section called &#8…

Twitter Thoughts For You

I previously have written back in March 2022 about how I use Twitter, and back in April 2023 about Twitter and its then-new algorithms, which have changed again.

The Weird, Fragmented World of Social Media After Twitter - The Atlan…

archived 7 Aug 2023 02:41:57 UTC

The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter: A Case Study of...

Following changes in Twitter's ownership in 2022 and subsequent changes to content moderation policies, many in academia looked to move their discourse elsewhere and migration to Mastodon was...

The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter: A Case Study of...

Following changes in Twitter's ownership in 2022 and subsequent changes to content moderation policies, many in academia looked to move their discourse elsewhere and migration to Mastodon was...

Criticism of X (social network)

X, formerly known as Twitter, has faced various criticisms over the years, particularly concerning content moderation, censorship, and platform management.

The Weird, Fragmented World of Social Media After Twitter

The common forum that Elon Musk destroyed will never be replaced—and that’s okay.

A Tweet Before Dying

The revolutionary internet is over, and we don’t have much to show for it. A new start is out there, somewhere.

The Future of Twitter: Q&A with Jack Dorsey

An in-depth conversation on 10 years of tweeting, the importance of live media, and “the puddle.”

RIP social media. What comes next is messy.

As social media splinters, how can we keep the new online spaces from devolving into toxic pits of despair?

Free Our Feeds

Social media is broken: controlled by a handful of billionaires who shape what people see, say, and believe. These platforms profit from division, exploit user data, and lock people into closed systems.

Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed

The [structural] mechanism producing these problematic outcomes is really robust and hard to resolve."