Goodbye, Farewell, Amen – Is the death knell for Twitter finally sounding?

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Around 9 PM EST last evening an editor for Silicon Valley news site, Platformer, sent out this rather alarming tweet:
As some time passed, the editor, Zoe Schiffer, went on to tweet that Twitter has told employees that the company's office buildings will be temporarily closed, effective immediately, and that workers were also informed that the offices would reopen on Monday, November 21st .
The company did not immediately give a reason for the move, but speculation has run rampant on Twitter itself and on most news sites as well.
The announcement comes amid reports that large numbers of staff were quitting after new owner, Elon Musk, called on them to sign up to be “hardcore” and expect “long hours at high intensity” or leave.
In response to a question about concerns that Twitter was on the verge of shutting down after the message about Twitter's offices being closed was sent, Musk glibly tweeted: “The best people are staying, so I'm not super worried.”
Ever since Musk became a prominent figure in the business world and, in turn, popular culture, I’ve taken to calling him a “cut-rate James Bond villain” for all his bizarre bravado and bluster. Over the past few weeks since he took over Twitter in a $44bn deal, lyrics from one of my favorite musicals have supplanted my original, film rogue take on the man. Those lyrics are:
“You sad, pathetic man, see where you've brought us to…our ideals die around us and all because of you. But the saddest cut of all: Someone has to turn you in. Like a common criminal, like a wounded animal. A jaded mandarin…a jaded mandarin…like a jaded, faded, faded, jaded, jaded mandarin.
"Every time I look at you I don't understand. Why you let the things you did get so out of hand. You'd have managed better if you had it planned...”
Beyond all these dramatic pretensions, Twitter is my personal favorite social media platform by far. I’ve been on it since June of 2009 and have in the neighborhood of four thousand followers. And, like many in the gaming realm, I’ve made a ton of real friends and business contacts because of Twitter. On top of that, I can’t even begin to count the number of gigs and actual leads for stories I’ve gotten via Twitter over the past thirteen years.
Another interesting thing that I’ve watched unfold on Twitter over the last couple weeks is the friends and colleagues I’ve mentioned in the gaming community mourning (via lengthy tweet threads) the inevitable loss of that community that we’ve all, for better or for worse, watched stumble and fall then, inevitably mature over the years. I’ve read as many as I could, and they’ve all touched me, but I wanted to wait until the time was right to do my own version of that and now seems as apropos a time as any.
There was a particularly interesting thread posted by freelance writer, Jessica Reyes, on a gaming journalism Facebook group that asked where everyone was going when Twitter died. Most people seemed to have a definitive idea where the next place was going to be to literally waste hours of their time (Cohost, Mastodon, and TikTok seemed to be the most popular answers), but I did not. I said at the time that I was going down with the Twitter ship and I mean that. I’m gonna keep checking the site/app until all I get is a 404 error for forty-eight hours straight…then I’ll walk away, cursing the disgraceful House of Musk.
Regardless, Twitter, the nefarious bird app that most have a love/hate relationship with, will be reduced to rubble soon enough because a petulant man-child with a ridiculous name seems dead set on letting his newly acquired digital world burn…and truly sad thing is: We don’t even really know why, but imagine spending FORTY-FOUR BILLION DOLLARS just to break something.
Requiescet in pace, Twitter…as the world falls down.
💬 Will you miss Twitter when it has gone the way of the dodo? Where will you migrate your social media presence to? Let me know down in the comments below!
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