We, the broader media, talk a lot about things we know ten percent about. It’s kind of the job. We aren’t scientists, but we know enough about science to talk about it. We aren’t professional sports executives, but we know enough about roster construction to talk about it. We aren’t sociologists, but we know enough about life to write columns. This is kind of the premise of media: Every now and then, there’ll be a crossover event where some economist gets his paws on a word processor, but for the most part, media is a go-between between experts and the public, or—more often on the sports side, anyway—a commentator without credentials.
This isn’t the whole of media, of course, but this is a long way to make my point, so let’s proceed anyway. The thing I am trying to say is that we, here at The Barking Crow, don’t know what’s going to happen to Twitter. It’s certainly tumultuous right now, we can see that—that many employees leaving a company at once is a big deal—but we don’t really know whether Twitter’s something that relies on institutional knowledge to stay afloat or if new hires could prop it back up. We also don’t know whether some non-technical decision could doom or excite the site in a existentially altering way. But, the feeling is there for millions that Twitter may be on its way out, and because we work in the media business, that’s a little scary.
The Barking Crow is not traditional media, and as such, it’s a little more reliant on Twitter than even the most Twitter-addicted “big-J journalists.” For a lot of journalists, Twitter is an active space, but their livelihood comes from their outlet. For us, Twitter is how we pulse our fanbase, and it’s how we often acquire pieces of that fanbase. It’s also, importantly, a useful networking tool. And, of course, it probably fuels the smoldering trash fire of anger we carry around with us at the state of society, speaking broadly, among other mental and emotional costs.
Twitter is a few things, but one way to evaluate it is to say that it’s a public blight and a private good. Twitter is probably bad for society. But it’s good for a lot of individuals, including—we think—us. It’s so essential to the media industry that demand for it as a concept appears likely to rage on regardless of whether capital-T Twitter continues to exist. It’s this last piece that segues nicely into what we really want to talk about, which is what The Barking Crow will do if Twitter does fall apart, whether that happens in one grand firework or a gradual disintegration that leaves Eddie Willers alone on a train in the desert.
A perception we’ve acquired is that it’s easier to gain followers in the early days of a social media platform than it is when users have been using the platform for a long time. There’s more of a proclivity to follow a lot of accounts when a user is new to the space than when they’ve grown comfortable with how they use it. Or, you know, something like that. The thought which stems from this is that if a Twitter-like service does emerge in its stead, it could be very good for us, allowing us to carve out space in the earlier moments. If a new Twitter weren’t to arise, though, and were we stuck with what we have, we’re not as sure of what we would do. The blog would be fine, we think—the gigantic majority of our traffic comes through search engines already—but we would lose direct contact with a lot of our fans, and with a few of our connections within the industry, and that’s scary. Facebook is chaos. Instagram and TikTok are performance for an audience. Twitter really is, in some sense, the proverbial town square. Most of what you do on it is talk to people. And for a blog that does a lot of sharing quick information (Joe Stunardi) and making quick jokes (NIT Stu), that’s a useful platform.
I don’t recommend our non-Twitter-using readers begin to use Twitter. Were we not beholden to it (and I am the least beholden to it of us three Stu’s), I like to think we’d let it fade from our own lives, along with much of social media. But we are beholden to it. It’s a big part of the job in media, at least the way we do media, and there are ways to build followings elsewhere but we have definitely grown up in the Twitter mold. The Barking Crow is heavily shaped by Twitter. If Twitter fades, do we pivot hard towards Facebook? Put out more visual content on Instagram? Produce more video content on YouTube or TikTok? Do we lean more into email, potentially through Substack? How, in this possible Twitter-less world, do we get people consuming things we create, whether on a social media platform itself or here on our website?
It’s hard to say right now, and my best guess is that Twitter isn’t going anywhere for at least a few years here and we won’t have to answer it, but I’m wrong a lot. I guess I don’t have many answers. We should probably work on changing that. Maybe it’d help us even if Twitter does survive.
