Nathan Schiller

The 1990s were a time when one could or could not be “into” computers. I was not particularly. I liked reading, writing, playing piano, playing sports, and hanging out with my friends. Computers made many of these things better, so I used them.

As the Internet and the web evolved, they revealed a mysterious new ether: a place where instantaneous global communications among humans could happen. The chatroom was the earliest incarnation for the masses. But with immature (if not nonexistent) verification, authentication, and governance, and without cheap and easy access, chatrooms devolved into bumbling, degenerate experiences.

Inevitably, they returned.

Twitter is a chatroom

Twitter is a chatroom, nothing more. I wrote this two years ago, in my first post here, to quickly explain why I chose a personal blog as my public writing space. I am, I don’t know, pleased?, glad?, vindicated?, every time I see the assessment seconded by serious technologists, like, most recently, Emily F. Gorcenski.

A chatroom can never be a publishing platform. No matter how much thoughtful, poignant, gripping prose is posted, the question is always: does it compel a reply? This is why engagement metrics are the only thing that matter to any website broadly defined as “social media.” (It is difficult to name web-based tools in a universal and satisfactory manner, the way it is not difficult to name physical tools, like forks and knives, cars and trucks, servers and routers, etc.) 

If users do not engage, a social media website becomes a digital representation of a physical object, a book, a newspaper, a television, a bulletin board. That is, static, unable to generate the data that can be leveraged into ad-based revenue.

Twitter, a public company that is, as of this writing, in contract with a hesitant buyer named Elon Musk, who will revert it to a private company, doesn’t “make money,” at least not the gobs of ad money that Facebook and Google continue to gobble up. But it makes enough to balance the needs of staff, the demands of advertisers, and the wishes of users. It’s enough to keep the chatroom open.

Twitter is not a town square

Users engaging on thoughts and information creates the impression that Twitter is a “town square.” But town squares are places where you get credit for showing up. Commuting creates the expectation that the energy expended ought to make the experience worthwhile. The value of the town square is warm bodies in a dedicated space, where interaction can be credibly reduced to observation. Has people watching ever gone out of fashion? 

Whenever we talk about the purposes of the Internet and the World Wide Web, we must remember that they are not intended to simulate the psycho-social human experience we were all birthed into. If a website tries to, it isn’t really an online thing, just an online place where you do things. 

You can ogle people online. The earliest versions of Facebook were essentially that, but that wasn’t a business model. Twitter found the next best thing: a place to speech watch. In other words, a chatroom. 

Twitter is history

Twitter is a tool for the past, an infinite scroll of what someone wrote and someone else replied. It exists to accept more tweets. All the words on Twitter—and Twitter is, of course, the domain of language—are relevant in relation to one another only. Twitter vernacular, that driver of real-life truth and consequence to Twitterers, can almost never be relevant to the people not on Twitter, which is the vast majority of them. Tweets, when subjected to the human action of being read aloud, are no longer arresting. They’re goofy.

For me, a Twitter observer, the combination of velocity and information is the point of the chatroom. The observation, verification, and presentation of physical world factoids—traditional media, let’s say—involves tedious, expensive labor. Twitter short-circuits the system, and lets anyone do it (though let’s remember that it’s your local news station’s Twitter account that tells you what happened).

Sure, you can swallow some disinformation. You can even wallow in it so much that you can argue that everything could be disinformation. But even in a buoyant chatroom free to the world, you can—if well trained, experienced, and interested—usually very quickly discern levels of truth and trust about what happened. Just remember to wonder whether that tense is the optimal one for a chatroom. Chatting is supposed to happen in the present.

Abuse can sink Twitter 

A relatively free and open chatroom (for users in relatively free and open societies) comes with a huge and terrifying cost. It is fertile ground for bad faith actors and anti-social behavior. Sure, users can block others, or not read replies. But blocking is not a native feature, and not reading replies is the antithesis of the medium. Anyway, an abuser can, with mediocre technical skill, bypass these obstacles. 

There are countless examples of bad online behavior having drastic offline consequences. When online tools, apps, websites, whatever you want to call them, nudge users in the direction of nastiness, they become approximations of our worst offline spaces. They become just another place for the strong to beat the weak. Over time, this makes them useless. Bullies commiserate with others in order to hurt. If the bullied scopes out the spot where this will happen, they will avoid it. If they’re not there, the bully won’t be either. Soon no one will. People, users, whatever you want to call them, still decide—whether they know it or not—the places to be.