The good
Ten years ago today, Twttr was born. It’s gained two vowels and an awful lot of users since then, but its mission is the same as it was ten years ago: to share SMS-sized messages among groups.
Those groups are global now, and Twitter serves 320 million monthly active users including us and, most likely, you.
We love Twitter, but we’re scared of it too. It makes us laugh like drains, but its users often act in ways that chill the blood.
After 10 years of tweets, it’s becoming clear that Twitter brings out the very best of people as well as the very worst. Here are the good, the bad and the rather more disturbing things about Twitter.
The good
Everybody’s equal
Of all the great things about Twitter, this is the secret of its success: it’s a level playing field. Protected accounts aside, anybody can follow, read tweets by and send tweets to anybody. Artists chat with their fans. Journalists get pulled up by the people they write about. Experts share their findings. News comes straight from the horse’s mouth without spin or selective quoting.
Provided you don’t follow a bunch of fools, Twitter is like the best pub conversation or dinner party in human history. As the cliché goes, Facebook is where you connect with people you know and don’t want to talk to. Twitter is where you connect with people you don’t know but wish you did.
It’s all killer, no filler
Twitter’s 140-character limit is widely broken through URL shorteners, multi-part tweets and image attachments, but it’s still the unique selling point of the service. Unlike other services that try to be everything, Twitter is all about keeping things short and sharp.
If it allowed status updates as verbose as Facebook ones, there’d be too much content for anybody to keep up with. Keeping things short means we can keep up with the firehose of Tweets, and it means we can get involved in the conversations even when we’re doing something else.
It’s like news, but better
For good and bad, news breaks on Twitter now. Not just the “attention seeker does attention seeking thing on Twitter” news, but the real news too. From terrorist attacks to rappers’ beefs, celebrity deaths to Bank of England monetary policy, there’s a very good chance that the news you’re interested in will come to you on Twitter long before it makes the pages of your favourite news source.
And Twitter is home to the fast fact-check too, so while hoaxes and rumours spread like any other social network the bad information is usually debunked very quickly.
It’s fantastically funny
Nothing on the internet makes us laugh as consistently and as helplessly as Twitter does. The level of comedy does depend on who you follow, but Twitter’s brevity means it’s a perfect venue for sarcy comments, memes, one-liner jokes, funny things people have spotted in shops, GIFs of people falling over, stupid things Tweeted at celebrities and demented police dramas such as Crimer Show.
There’s something about Twitter that brings out everybody’s inner comedian, and that means it’s a seam of comedy gold.
It isn’t Facebook… yet
On Twitter you don’t have to wade through other people’s baby photos, or invitations to play Clash of Clans, or hoaxes that were debunked ten years ago, or political or religious viewpoints that drive you crazy. And with third-party tools that enable you to block and mute specific keywords, you can even filter the content you see – which is handy if you follow people for artistic or work reasons and not their blow-by-blow commentaries on obscure sporting events.
The bad
The bad
Twitter’s treatment of third party apps
Third party apps helped fuel Twitter’s meteoric rise, not least Twitteriffic: it coined “Tweet”, introduced replies and conversations and put Twitter on the iPhone. But in late 2012 Twitter began dramatically limiting third parties’ access to the service, and what was a thriving developers’ playground has largely gone. It’s all about the ads: Twitter needs people to see the advertising that pays its bills, and with third party apps it can’t guarantee that people will.
Thieves
Twitter can be a good forum for exposing plagiarists – small designers routinely embarrass the high street fashion chains that nick their designs – but it’s also a good forum for plagiarists to operate in. Joke thieves are a particular headache for comedians who see their brand new jokes shared on Twitter without credit before they’ve even finished their show, and some people base their entire Twitter presence on stealing others’ work. Twitter has also become a source of unpaid content for some highly profitable sites that we won’t mention but you know who they are.
Twitter mobs
At its best Twitter is hilarious, at its worst it’s horrific. Celebrities send Twitter mobs howling after their critics, poorly chosen words result in a torrent of abuse, people who disagree with others can round up a posse to try and drive their enemies offline, and a joke tweeted before you board a flight can have you sacked before you land. All too often Twitter appears to be a kind of instant outrage machine, George Orwell’s Two Minute Hate made depressingly real.
Trolls
Trolling is a word whose meaning has changed dramatically. What was a light-hearted attempt to wind up rival fans of music, football or economic theories has become a term to describe the systematic abuse of minorities, and of women in particular, by people who don’t understand the hurt they’re causing but who understand that the chances of being caught are infinitesimal.
Twitter’s apparent inability to control trolling could well be its downfall: a service where many of its users can expect to be routinely abused is a service facing a threat to its very existence.
Where does it go from here?
Twitter is currently in a tricky situation. Its shareholders are demanding growth (users to you and I) but it has to do this without alienating its current, highly loyal user base.
Changes are happening and fast. The addition of Moments is a recent and great way to entice new people to the service. As it’s an extra tab, older users can choose to ignore it, while newer Twitter followers can delve in, find people to follow and feel like they are part of a bigger thing. There’s nothing lonelier than hitting Twitter for the first time and not knowing what to do or who to follow – never mind what the hell a retweet is.
Twitter’s recent algorithm change, however, is something altogether different and worrying. It’s a big change that affects all users, though you can opt out. Gone is Twitter’s reverse chronology of Tweets and in its place at the top of your timeline are Tweets it reckons you will like.
Again, it’s a change that’s been put in place to pander to new users and make the service more approachable but this may put power users off. Couple this with the possibility of the 140-character limit disappearing, at least in some form, and what you have is a very different Twitter from what it is now.
All of these changes have happened so quickly over the last few months, trying to guess what the site will look in 2026 would be remiss of us.
Here’s hoping, though, that it’s a place free from trolls and thieves and packed with everything that currently keeps us coming back to it every single day: tweets that make us want to laugh, cry, share and shout.
Source: techradar.com