I was reflecting today (2023-07-08) on an amusing take from my friend on Twitter and Meta's new platform, Threads.
He Tweeted: “threads my copy [Twitter’s] UI, but [the Thread’s team] will never copy the toxicity”
And I replied: “[The toxicity is] unironically a good feature of twitter”
Why do I believe this?
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating for an overdose of negativity or suggesting we all guzzle down vats of toxic discourse. It's important to take care of your mental health and moderate your intake of negativity. But there's an authenticity, a realness to Twitter that I find lacking in platforms like Instagram or LinkedIn.
Yes, Instagram and LinkedIn serve their purposes, but they will never match Twitter's role as the 'town square' for humanity—especially when it comes to discussions about where trillions of dollars of taxpayer dollars go and other issues that deeply matter to our collective flourishing.
When I'm trying to understand the world, the conflicts and debates on Twitter offer a uniquely valuable lens. I don't want a sanitized, echo-chamber view of the world, and that's what I feel I get when I browse someone's Instagram profile or read through a LinkedIn feed.
A lot of this has to do with product design but a lot of it just has to do with philosophies around censorship. Mark Zuckerberg and his teams have a reputation for heavy-handed “moderation” of people who get into debates on Facebook and Instagram.
Sure, divisions and disagreements, and certainly personal attacks, can be unpleasant, but they're a part of reality. In the reply wars on Twitter, cordiality may be a rare commodity, but you do get to see how people truly think. Twitter does need to manage its bot issue, like every other platform, but once you filter out the noise, you gain insight into how people form their opinions.
If you're a public figure or if you're trying to solve real-world problems, understanding these fault lines is crucial. When a significant figure like Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, or Donald Trump makes a contentious statement, you want to see the disagreements, not just the praises of their staunch supporters. Unless, of course, you're only interested in dwelling in echo chambers.
Yesterday, Lindsay Graham tweeted about his full-throated support of Ukraine joining NATO. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with that position or not. You should appreciate that real disagreement surfaced on this public figure’s public communication.
That's the thing about Twitter: it's an incredibly powerful tool for understanding humanity and our cultural differences. That understanding is necessary to do anything meaningful with two or more groups that disagree on issues.
Without Twitter, we're merely lost in a polished, artificial reality—great for escapism, perhaps, but not for genuinely making sense of our world.
Perhaps escapism, product promotion, and light-hearted interactions are what Threads is for. After all, Mark Zuckerberg stated a couple days ago that his vision with Threads is "to create an open and friendly public space for conversation.”
Ultimately, as long as Twitter remains the only widely adopted platform for raw, genuine debate, I doubt any new contender will usurp its place as the world’s town square for the necessarily contentious conversations that I believe matter most to our collective future.