When Elon Musk took over, his updates to Twitter’s terms of service resulted in hate speech on the platform skyrocketing. Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, resigned from the company alongside other top employees tasked with ensuring platform safety for users and brands alike.
Spill has such stringent policies that The Shade Room was almost immediately kicked off the platform by users, while Bluesky filters let someone join with a handle that was just a racial slur. Competitors need to strike the right balance between allowing users to feel comfortable posting about their thoughts and experiences, while also putting in safety measures that will reassure advertisers that the app isn’t going to be harmful to a brand or service.
Messiness
One of Twitter’s biggest strengths is its imperfections. Where Instagram was a highlight reel, Twitter was seemingly off the cuff. Everything felt very authentic; people posting about their struggles, likes and dislikes, posts riddled with typos and a degree of unhinged “who is also up at 3am?” energy. While other platforms chased short-form video and polished influencer-driven content, Twitter stayed true to itself and remained a platform dictated by its users, not its algorithm.
Because Twitter is so dialogue-driven, its “influencers” felt like your average everyday person with anywhere from 5,000 to 50,000 followers, unlike the 100,000+ accounts that shape the user experience on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. There were no boxes or labels to put on your content. You could be a power user and not be a “content creator.” In a way, Twitter was the place for everything you’d keep far away from your LinkedIn.
The ability to participate in the conversation gave everyone the ability to become the app’s main character for the day and allowed brands and companies to feel more relatable; they were in on the joke. This is one area that will be especially difficult to imitate.
Chronological timelines
Like all the platforms around it, Twitter experimented numerous times with shifting away from chronological feeds and toward a rank-based, algorithm-driven system. But unlike other platforms, Twitter’s users successfully got the platform to keep the chronological feed an option and the main user experience until Musk’s arrival.
A chronological feed is vital for following topics in real time—many used Twitter to join in on sporting events, television premieres, festivals, elections and awards shows. Who could forget instant memes like Bernie Sanders’ mittens or The Slap? Twitter was the loudest town square on the internet, and many of its daily users enjoyed having a seat at the show.
Twitter also invented the hashtag. When combined with chronological timelines, hashtag groupings allowed not only easily following along with live events but were also responsible for catalyzing more than a handful of national and global social uprisings and movements. They are also used by local government and aid groups to quickly convey information in emergencies.
For other platforms to take Twitter’s place, they’ll need to be able to have a similar use value.
