How Elon Musk accidentally sparked a social media renaissance

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in late 2022, one has often heard the refrain that “Twitter is dying.” (Although Musk has rebranded the site as X, here we’ll use its more familiar name.) Twitter is certainly struggling, but it’s also stubbornly defied predictions about its demise. It is the incumbent in its category and is owned by the world’s richest man. So long as Musk cares about Twitter, even his rake-stepping mismanagement won’t drive it into total irrelevance. 

The real innovation isn’t happening inside Twitter, but outside it. The social networking format of microblogging — online platforms enabling short-form messaging by users who follow each other’s accounts — has come alive for the first time in over a decade.

Soon after its launch in 2006, Twitter attracted its share of competition. Pownce, Jaiku and Google Buzz were among those seeking to merge blogging and social networking on a single platform. But Twitter won, and by 2010 it was the only meaningful app in its category.

Twitter was never social networking’s big winner — that was Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. It instead settled for something more respectable, if less profitable: broad cultural relevance. Twitter famously fomented political revolutions, infamously fueled Donald Trump’s presidential aspirations and was called the “world’s town square” without irony.

Much later came Musk, who emerged as Twitter’s most frequent “main character“ after Trump was banned following the Capitol insurrection. Since taking the company private in October 2022, he’s fired three-quarters of the workforce, tanked ad revenue and welcomed white supremacists back to the platform, among too many controversies to catalog here.

This has created an opening for competition once again, and two platforms have emerged as the strongest Twitter has ever faced. The first is Threads, launched by Zuckerberg in July, which became the fastest-adopted software in history. The other is Bluesky, which launched quietly in February, but has been growing steadily ever since.

Threads and Bluesky have both reached critical mass, and each offers a unique value proposition. The three platforms are complementary, leaving space for the others to thrive.

Let’s start with Twitter, which used to be for everyone, but these days is good for live events, sports and MAGA. Notwithstanding its noisily departing power users, it still has by far the largest audience: some 200 million worldwide, almost half of them in the U.S.

To the consternation of many recovering Twitter addicts, Musk’s changing political views have significantly boosted the fortunes of anti-woke activists and right-wing conspiracy theorists, sometimes by algorithm and sometimes just by paying them. Don’t follow any of these accounts? Too bad, they’re still being shoved into your feed. 

Twitter really comes alive during live events, such as the Super Bowl and Oscar night, but also on college football Saturdays, HBO Sunday evenings, candidate debates and, well, anything on national television with a big enough audience.

The last diehards will be sports fans, who get their news and highlights not from SportsCenter, but Twitter. NBA Twitter in particular is one of the site’s most vibrant communities. The network effect is so strong, and Twitter still has the best real-time feed, that they’ll put up with the rest.

Meanwhile, Threads has found an audience with marketers, liberals and those who value a premium user experience. Threads is spare, elegant and serene. Threads is nice.

Seven of the top 10 global brands, as ranked by Interbrands, are active on the platform. This compares favorably to nine of 10 on the much larger Twitter, and they may even get better engagement. What’s holding Threads back is the recent slowdown in growth and usage, which has generated doomsaying headlines. But it still has more than 10 million daily active users. 

Threads also has plenty of fans in the so-called elite, including former Twitter celebrities. These include Taylor Lorenz, David French and Ezra Klein among political writers, and Kara Swisher, Casey Newton and John Gruber among technology commentators. 

Finally, Bluesky is the wild card. Bluesky is for lefty activists and humorists, including refugees from “rose Twitter“ and “weird Twitter.” Unlike Threads, it is not elegant; the way it displays replies is clunky and repetitive. It also still isn’t open to the public, nine months after launch. This exclusivity has held back overall growth — Bluesky just cracked 1 million users in early September — but also contributes to its hipster vibe.

Bluesky is the choice of politically minded Twitter refugees who couldn’t bring themselves to sign up for Zuck’s new thing. And several of the most celebrated “weird Twitter” accounts are active on Bluesky: Da share z0ne, Pixelated Boat, Internet Hippo and, the king of them all, Dril.

Meanwhile, all three of these platforms are likewise bad at things the others are good at. 

In the Musk era, Twitter is inhospitable to major brands, who may still tweet but have largely stopped advertising, and live in fear of the trolls, harassment and racism associated with the far right. The anti-Trump “resistance” has exited, while Twitter-originating subcultures such as Black Twitter, science Twitter, and academic Twitter haven’t decided where to go.

Threads has lagged in features from the start, lacking a web interface until almost two months post-launch. Its content restrictions are good for brand safety but bad for entertainment value, so “weird Twitter” and MAGA are few in number. And its recent decision to block searches for words like “Covid” and “vaccines” is unpopular with those who follow news and politics.

Bluesky being private means it isn’t very useful for live events, including sports, and no major brands are present. Right-wing accounts are equally scarce, likely an intentional platform choice. One can imagine Bluesky choosing to never open up, preserving its unique character.

All of this is fantastic news for those who favor the written word in their social media usage, even as TikTok and Instagram are far more popular. There is new energy in the space, and no single platform will be everything to everyone again.

Truly, Elon Musk should be considered an icon of capitalism, if not for popularizing the electric car, then for doing something Twitter’s earlier rivals never could. Musk’s incompetence has dislodged Twitter as the world’s town square — and made social media interesting again.

William Beutler is the founder of Beutler Ink, a digital creative agency specializing in content creation, social media and Wikipedia. He was previously a writer with National Journal Group.