Farewell, Twitter

Others have explained how I feel about Twitter much better than I could, so I've been mostly silent on the subject. But I think that Simon's perspective aligns well with mine: "unless you have a business, product or skill to promote, stop giving idiot billionaires your thoughts and energy." I wrote something similar a couple weeks ago, and I think that's why we see folks like Wes Bos and Adam Wathan—that is, people with something to sell—still tweeting merrily away.

But I'm not crazy about hanging out there anymore—not that I contributed particularly to the discourse in the first place. But Twitter's value is in its mindshare, and in its network effects, and in its community—and a lot of that community is moving off of the platform.

That being said, there's to be a certain web development subdemographic for whom Twitter continues to be where the community lives, and I think that that subdemographic probably hasn't been impacted particularly by Twitter's change in leadership. People like Wes and Adam have to stay on Twitter, and have to stay bullish on Twitter, because that's where a lot of their audience is; but others, like Taylor Otwell, give me the vibe that they don't mind Musk's leadership.

Personally, I'm also not a huge fan of Mr. Musk, but per the above advice I don't spend a ton of time thinking about him, and I don't rate his ability to micromanage a social network.

Farewell, Twitter, Simon Collison