It’s a truth universally acknowledged that there is the real world, with all its sprawling ambiguity and apathy, and then there is Twitter, where absolute certainty and tribal division reign supreme. And it’s a further truth, almost as widely accepted, that if you want to be an opinion-former, wield influence and make an impact, you had better not spend too much time in the real world.
Yet for the past 17 years that is where I’ve chosen to remain. A journalist without Twitter is a bit like an exhibitionist who’s agoraphobic – how are you going to be seen? And what chance do you have of generating that digital meteorological phenomenon of which we all, individuals and businesses, walk in awed terror: the Twitterstorm?
That at least had been the prevailing wisdom until Elon Musk began tinkering with his new $44bn toy after acquiring it last October. In the novelty-fetishising world of tech, where looking a day out of date can prove terminal, there have been growing complaints that Twitter is going backwards. One critic, the blogger and author Cory Doctorow, poetically declared the regression a process of “enshittification”.
Twitter also now finds itself battling with a new competitor, Threads, the strikingly Twitter-like platform launched last week by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta empire (which includes Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp). Zuckerberg has form on imitating other apps, Instagram’s reels being a barely disguised take-off of TikTok.
All of which means that Twitter appears in danger of becoming inessential. The perfect time to join, then, for someone like me who is congenitally late to the party. And going against all my tardy adopter instincts, I also joined Threads to see what all the fuss was about.
One of the reasons I never got round to signing up to Twitter was that I feared I might end up arguing with strangers late into the night about things that didn’t really matter that much to me. After all, that’s what other people – particularly, but not exclusively, men – seemed to do.
I know this because I’m a member of Facebook and not infrequently friends post messages saying that they are in an almighty scrap over on Twitter with someone I’ve never heard of, and put up screenshots of their toxic exchanges. On Facebook I’d had maybe two barbed disagreements in 15 years, which was more than enough. Although I’m not an active user, it’s been largely inoffensive in my experience, and a near perfect waste of time.
That was another reason to resist the lure of the tweet: time management. I already spend more time than I knew I had scrolling through images of friends’ holidays and reels of comic pratfalls on Instagram. I don’t have the spare frittering capacity to indulge two further platforms of screaming opinion.
So what did I encounter in my hours spent lurking on Twitter and Threads? The experience reminds me of my unsatisfactory visits to immersive theatre. “You must see it!” friends say of some cutting-edge production in a disused warehouse, and then you go there, walk from one darkened space to another staring at a mime artist or some dreary installation and wonder what it is that you’re missing. The transformative happening is always somewhere else, just out of sight, and I’m left looking at an utterly underwhelming spectacle.
So it proved with Twitter. To sign up, you need to specify interests from a list that seems oddly weighted towards astrology and horoscopes, and you’re also given a choice of popular figures to follow. Top of the list I’m presented with is the Colombian songstress Shakira. Given that so much of what is published on Twitter is said to be of questionable veracity, I tick her box, reassured by the knowledge that her hips don’t lie.
Another suggestion is James O’Brien, the reticent radio phone-in host, who I decide not to follow on the basis that his opinions seem inescapable even though I never listen to his radio show. And sure enough, despite not following him, he’s there on my Twitter feed, giving another kicking to a wide-open door with his new book on how the Tories broke Britain.
To a novice, it feels cacophonous, like a thousand Speakers’ Corners crammed into one town square. So I ask some longterm Twitter users what the appeal is or was. The novelist Linda Grant says it’s good “for breaking news and book promotion”. She speaks of following the “real-time tweets” of a friend during the Arab Spring and checking for public transport hold-ups in London. Others speak of it being a portal into other lives and conversations, “a cheapskate’s wire agency feed”, and a handy way to deal with energy suppliers. It must be said, however, that a recurring word I hear is “cesspit”. And the consensus seems to be that its best days are past, with many people having left, and obnoxious characters having been allowed back.
Grant notes that Threads, Twitter’s latest competitor (several have fallen by the wayside), has no chronological timeline and at present no topic search facility. On closer inspection, the main thing that Threads seems to be offering is self-congratulatory posts from Zuckerberg: “Threads just passed 2 million sign-ups in first two hours”, endless memes referencing the rivalry between Zuckerberg and Musk (who have threatened to wage combat in a cage fight), and pleas to be kinder and more civil and compassionate from Gary Vaynerchuk, a self-promoting social media guru.
I also get the job lot of all my Instagram friends who’ve signed up to Threads. My favourite comment among these is from novelist Nick Hornby, who lends an appropriate dose of irony to the celebratory spirit. “I have never been among the first 10 million users of ANYTHING,” he enthuses. “I feel giddy.”
The rest is the usual load of random flotsam and jetsam that washes up on the social media shoreline: a photo of the French footballer Kylian Mbappé and the queen of modern-day influencers, Kim Kardashian, receives heavy rotation. There is a notification from Zuckerberg that Threads has reached 70 million users. “Way beyond our expectations.” And a forest of seemingly non-sequitur posts.
It’s early days and perhaps it will grow into some utopian community of ideas, where everyone respects each other and reliable information flows like pure mountain streams through digital culture. Perhaps. But at the moment I’m reminded of that old Gertrude Stein line, there’s no there there.
Back on Twitter, I read that Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over “systematic, wilful and unlawful misappropriation” of its trade secrets and IP. Musk’s lawyer has apparently sent a cease-and-desist letter to Zuckerberg. Musk tweets: “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”
Going back and forth between the two platforms is like entering a hall of mirrors, in which the most interesting thing is the distorted image projected by each of the other. Two narcissistic billionaires vying for our attention – how can we resist?
All too easily, in my case. But that’s not to say I haven’t learned anything from the experience. For example, I read that if you quit Threads you also have to leave Instagram. Well, that should kill two birds with one stone. I think I’m going to be spending even more time back in the mundane obscurity of the real world.
