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Twitter isn’t officially dead yet but it might as well be.
I’ve been thinking about Twitter lately. Maybe you have too since giant manbaby Elon Musk closed his (heavily leveraged with Saudi money) $40 billion acquisition of the social media platform. I am not at all qualified to accurately predict what will happen to the company as it faces mountains of debt and huge staff layoffs. Maybe the son of a South African gunslinger will surprise us all and turn the company around both financially and as a force for good in the world. I wouldn’t bet my money on it but you do you.
What I’ve really been noodling on is what post-Twitter NBA life might be like if it comes to that. Let’s discuss.
First though, a quick trip back through my timeline.
I joined Twitter in the summer of 2008 right before I drove up to Las Vegas to watch Phoenix Suns rookie Robin Lopez play his first games at NBA Summer League. By gosh, the world simply couldn’t wait the several whole hours it would take me to post a game story to enjoy my super hot takes. And thanks to this new internet innovation, @sethpo could just “tweet” them live. I’ve been around the blue bird ever since although I admit over the past few years I spend a lot less time doom scrolling. It’s much better for my mental health.
I even played a small role in maybe pushing Shaquille O’Neal to join the platform later that year. At the time, Shaq was one of the biggest names to join and it helped kick off the meteoric rise of Twitter’s popularity. It’s kind of a long story, but basically, I got fooled by a fake Shaq account and wrote a story calling out the real Shaq who heard about it from a Suns digital marketing person who encouraged Shaq to join and become the @Shaq we’ve grown to accept as being the actual large person the account claims to be thanks in large part to a blue check mark which is a very effective system Elon Musk seems hell-bent on destroying. Sigh.
The real treasure was the friends we made along the way
Back in its heyday, the NBA Twittersphere was something to behold. It was a true digital sports bar where on any given night you could be assured of spirited and relatively civil conversations about the ridiculous upside of Keith Van Horn or celebrate rookie Brandon Jennings dropping 55 points on Steph Curry. Legit NBA personalities like Taco Trey Kerby (@treykerby) and my old pal Matt Moore (@hpbasketball) would have actual discussions with average fans and not fear being assaulted with a barrage of digital hate.
It used to be possible to actually meet people online and build real meaningful friendships. Communities were formed. Bonds were built. Our innately human need to be social was met by this social media phenomena.
Those were the good ole days before the morning sports trending topic was a hashtag defending the antisemitic actions of a certain point guard. Trust me, you don’t want to look.
For those of us in the media biz, Twitter was a legit way to build personal and corporate #brands. It was a big part of our distribution strategy back when you could elevate your credibility on a specific subject like out-of-bounds plays in the last two minutes of Tuesday night games and then turn that following into traffic you could make money from. Maybe you can still do that, but it’s damn sure harder and you end up creating a LOT of free content for Twitter in the process. I happen to have a master’s degree in business so I am qualified to tell you that giving things away for free is not a path to financial success. That there is the kind of brilliant insight you used to be able to get from me on Twitter. No more.
This is really starting to feel like an obituary. The time for that may come soon and if it does I’m sure brilliant writers like Tom Ziller or maybe even Free Darko will give that eulogy much better than I ever could.
If it comes to that, maybe Reddit or Telegram will pick up the slack. Or maybe something new will come along and fill the vacuum nature and markets abhor.
We’ll surely find some way to get the latest breaking trade rumor pushed directly into our phones and/or brains. We live in the Information Age after all so I don’t worry about staying up to date on the latest and greatest thing that can’t just can’t wait. But I don’t think we’ll ever be able to recreate those good digital times we had together. Which, if we’re being honest, came to an end round about 2015-16. A lot of things changed in the world back around that time but Google Trends confirms that was when the term “twitterverse” fell off a cliff and our collective sanity hasn’t been too far behind.
Farewell, twitterverse. It’s been real. At least we still have democracy.
