/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/ZONNJAVKKYVGCCOYCVHAXIHIKI.jpg "The agony of Twitter is nearing its end | Opinion")
The big social networks are dying very slowly. They begin to die at the summit, when no one thinks about their disappearance. Facebook has not attracted users under the age of 30 since 2012, when it still crowned itself responsible for the Arab spring; Instagram has lost teenagers since 2018, when it celebrated its first billion users. Mark Zuckerberg said it was an existential problem. In 2021, he changed the name of the company in the vain hope of taking years off. No teen wants to walk into her parents’ bar while they’re still there.
The whale struggles to maintain its relevance. When a new platform appears with new filters, stories o roomsyou have to eat it. Buying, as Facebook did with Instagram and WhatsApp; plagiarizing, like she did with Snapchat; or trying to ban it, like it does with TikTok. Even winning battles, longevity is the mother of disappointment. Over time there are protests about changes in the interface, politics, algorithm, data extraction, misinformation. How to be in the ointment when your users want the business to change but everything stays the same. The whale atrophies and this phase can last a long time. The agony of Facebook seems long, but beware that MySpace still exists.
In a large network, galaxies can disappear without anyone noticing. As has happened on Twitter with the international #infosec community. Cybersecurity professionals and amateurs who have fled en bloc to Mastodon, where there is a server managed by former Twitter employees and another managed by the former Facebook security chief. But most users hold on hoping that Twitter will remain Twitter. The collapse only comes when they stop experiencing the emotion that made them come back.
The Twitter user has tolerated all manner of abjections, including misinformation, harassment, and the mindless cynicism of fake mercenary troll accounts, with their daily dose of venom and stupidity. All of this contributed to filling the platform with what he really seeks: dopamine. Emotional charge is the main predictor of interaction on all platforms and, therefore, the key ingredient of its recommendation algorithm.
Dopamine arrives in different ways. “For some it’s the libidinal pleasure of seeing friends and sharing with the community,” explained Danah Boyd, president of the Data & Society Research Institute. The posts that make you laugh or brighten your day. For others, it’s the masochistic desire to watch content that raises blood pressure. And there are others who cannot resist the drama of a train crash. The Twitter algorithm was optimized to show us the content that channeled those emotions. Boyd calls them “posts emotionally sticky. They produce the emotions that make us come back.
In the last two weeks, Elon Musk has modified the algorithm to optimize the visibility of Elon Musk. The users who do posts emotionally clingy are still on Twitter, but we don’t see them anymore. The dopamine has turned into frustration. Twitter is over, but a lonelier and darker era begins. The drama has moved to a new hyper-targeted multi-personality advertising platform, called ChatGPT, Sydney, or Bing.
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