In 2008, I heard about a new site called Twitter. The whole thing seemed a bit funny, like a Facebook where all you could do was post and read status updates. So I, someone who had never shied away from sharing her thoughts online, joined and posted some pretty inane things.
I wasn’t sure it would catch on.
Within a few years I had a little following on there of people who I followed back. Most people’s tweets had become more sophisticated. There was a specific sort of posting language that evolved on Twitter, part quip, part self-deprecation, part provocation, part boast. If you struck the right tone, you’d be retweeted until your ‘mentions’ were just a stream of likes and retweets.
But a tipping point was quickly reached where a popular tweet didn’t just get boosts of support. ‘RIP your mentions’ became a comment directed at someone who’d tweeted something guaranteed to attract attention. That was the constant dance on Twitter - attracting enough attention, but not too much.
If you’ve read the Jon Ronson book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, you’ll know that by the early 2010s Twitter had the potential to literally ruin people’s lives. That sounds a bit OTT, but it really was the case. Many of the incidents in his book were relatively nuanced, like donglegate, where what happened was on the surface troubling - and had a horrible impact on people - but had many layers of hurt beneath it.
Often with Twitter shaming and Twitter dramas, there were these layers beneath them because the site really was like the famed ‘town square’ that early internet pioneers sought. It brought millions of people together, giving them space to air their thoughts and opinions.
This meant people who had up to then felt ignored now had the opportunity to be listened to in a fresh way. I think a lot of people saw Twitter, whether consciously or not, as a place to redress previous wrongs. To make right society’s missteps.
Sometimes this had serious and necessary global impacts - look at #MeToo or Black Lives Matter, which were given space and power on Twitter.
But sometimes it meant a person presuming bad faith on the behalf of someone else could attempt to ‘bring them to justice’. I once saw a tweet where an American woman shared a video from a doorbell camera of a neighbour who she thought was acting ‘suspiciously’. The ‘suspicious’ woman was easily identifiable. I dread to think of the impact that tweet had on her.
By the time the likes of that video was being posted, just before the Covid-19 pandemic, Twitter 1.0 - the Twitter I had joined in 2008 and watched evolved - had reached both its peak and its nadir.
It was a ridiculously powerful place where a person’s career could blow up (in a good way), where individuals could be hauled over the coals for their behaviour, where news broke before it got to the media, where politicians posted official apologies. It was a platform where nobodies could become celebrities and celebrities could injure their careers.
The media paid close attention to everything that happened on there, which just enhanced its power, even though it wasn’t the most popular social media site.
I barely need to bring you up to speed with what happened next. (And I cover some of it in my book Social Capital). The pandemic saw misinformation spread on Twitter and other social media sites alongside the real virus. By late 2022 Elon Musk had taken over and a lot of the positive changes the company had made to deal with Twitter’s bad sides were being reversed or forgotten about.
Twitter is no longer the place I go to for breaking news. I used to visit it multiple times a day and feel left out if I didn’t. Now I don’t visit for days at a time. It no longer has the same meaning to me and many other people I know. It’s no longer essential.
It is, instead, an often unfriendly and troubling place where racist, far-right leaders are speedily gathering fans. At the head of the site is Musk, like the merry Pied Piper tweeting his bizarre and often stupid tweets.
Who’d want to spend time there?
But I miss the old Twitter days. Amidst all of the dodgy and strange things that I detailed above, there was much goodness.
Irish Twitter truly was a ‘community’ in the early 2010s, and the site was a place for expression and humour, friendship and emotion. People wrote things on Twitter that were deeply personal because they knew that there were others on there who’d tell them they cared. And they did care. People grieved on there. They came out there. They shared news about pregnancies, new jobs. They shared lines from favourite books and screengrabs from favourite films. They bonded over obscure hobbies. They met in real life, they struck up romances, they made friends, they got married after meeting on Twitter.
Twitter felt like it gathered everything that was happening in the world - good, bad, awful, appalling, inspirational, lovely - and handed it to you in one big lump. It could be overwhelming and annoying to have to scroll through hundreds of tweets that all told you something of alleged importance. The site was like a slot machine that threatened to one day let you win. Its everlasting scroll sucked you in and never spat you out.
Without Twitter, I have gotten brain space back. I no longer think in tweets. I no longer go straight to the site to post my ‘hot take’ about something or to post a funny line I thought up. Not being active on there right now is definitely for the best.
But you never quite realise the good side to something until it’s gone. I miss the sense of familiarity on there, the pals and the chats, the ability to post an opinion about a book, film, actor, album, what have you, and strike up a conversation with someone instantly. I miss the sense that ‘everyone’ was talking about the same thing at the same time.
I miss those heady days right before Twitter’s power turned it into a cesspit, when the balance was tipped in favour of all the good stuff - the late-night chats, the fascinating threads, the funny tweets, the sense that the utopian dreams about the internet were not dreams at all, they were real life.
I miss the surge of adrenaline while watching news literally unfold on the site, of feeling in the pocket of an international moment. I miss the stupid stuff.
Now, let’s not get too carried away and imagine that the Twitter of old was a perfect place. It was far from perfect. But it was a way into a community that formed somewhat organically and that had the genuine power to affect people. It felt like real life, because in many ways it was real life.
Perhaps part of my sadness about losing this phase of Twitter is that I’m grieving for who I was back then. I joined in my late twenties, when I was just starting out in the adult world. I had dreams of doing certain things and I’ve achieved some of them. I was making mistakes and learning - and a lot of that unfolded on Twitter, too.
Those years are all gone and I can’t get them back, just as I can’t get that early experience of Twitter back. Part of aging is accepting that you didn’t always appreciate your youth, and yet you will never be able to relive it.
It’s also realising that you’re a different version of yourself now, and so to reverse back into the past would be a bad idea. You’d meet yourself in the middle of the road and not quite recognise who’s in front of you.
We can’t get the old Twitter back, and perhaps if we did we’d realise our nostalgia has been obscuring some of its more obvious problems. But I do sometimes think of the good days on Twitter, and how they gave me friends and experiences and work that changed something for me, and I’m thankful for that.
The sadness I feel about where it is now is genuine, and the fear I feel about its real-life impacts on Ireland is deep.
No wonder I still think of the good times, back when everything that’s unfolded since was unimaginable.
I miss the old Twitter also. I remember signing up in 2009 and following you, a few other journos and various other people of "Irish Twitter". I also started following various bands and it was so easy to keep up with new music. For me, the first thing I saw trending on Irish Twitter was when Adebisi Shank released International Dreambeat. I still hang out there far more than I should but probably not as much as I used to. I kind of lay low and I've blocked a lot of the headbangers so I don't get much abuse but it's still a cesspool nonetheless.