2018 is the year that Twitter ceases to be relevant.
It’s already stopped being relevant for me. I’ve stopped using it, and have deleted all of my tweets.
As a user, it’s just not worth it. It’s a miserable experience, made much worse by the userbase being made up primarily of Russian bots posing as MAGA idiots, actual alt-right MAGA idiots, and a small kernel of real people saying intelligent things that are drowned out by noise.
I’ve done (and still do) a lot of advertising on the web. For all of the different things I’ve been into, the worst ROI has consistently been via Twitter. Maybe some business types are viable via their ad platform, but none I’ve been involved in have been. It’s been a total waste of money. Mailing postcards would be a better value.
Most of the people I know in meatspace with accounts have stopped using it long ago. Some stopped in 2015, some in 2016, some in 2017. I can name maybe five people who use it regularly, and some of them echo their tweets to Facebook. I don’t have a huge circle of friends, but compare that to about 140 on Facebook with about 40% of them being active (50 or so people) and the order of magnitude population reduction makes it far less interesting. Facebook has its own problems, but it still manages to be relevant, unlike Twitter.
Even though Twitter is garbage to me, maybe it isn’t garbage to everyone else.
Nope.
There hasn’t been much recent coverage that I can find with about 15 seconds of effort, but these from last year don’t paint a rosy picture:
Twitter is now losing users in the U.S
http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/27/technology/business/twitter-earnings/index.html
Twitter revenues decline for first time as advertising falls away
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/26/twitter-revenues-fall-first-quarter-results-advertising
Library of Congress Gives Up Collecting All Tweets Because Twitter Is Garbage
https://gizmodo.com/library-of-congress-gives-up-on-twitter-because-twitter-1821581190
When Twitter finally dies, nearly nothing of value will be lost.
And if it doesn’t die, why care?