The Press Box - The Night Everyone Thought Twitter Was Going to Die

Episode Date: November 18, 2022

In this near-emergency podcast, Bryan and David discuss the madness happening with Twitter and if it could actually shut down. They talk about the reaction to the potential end of the social media site, how the conversation has evolved, and the Musk of it all. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Associate Producer: Carlos Chiriboga Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The time has come to get ready for the 2022 World Cup. And what better way to prepare than by revisiting the World Cup's most amazing goals? I'm Brian Phillips. I'm making a podcast about the history of the men's World Cup, told through the stories of 22 iconic goals. The show's called 22 goals. It's out now on the Ringer podcast network, and we're having so much fun. David? Yes. A lot of people were worried Twitter might die last night.

So this is a test of our press box emergency broadcast system for reporters. If Twitter dies, please tune to this podcast where David and I will be offering instructions on essential journalistic functions. For instance, what new site can journalists use to release? relentlessly promote their own work. If Twitter dies, we will tell journalists where they can post photos of empty football fields taken from the press box and add the caption, My Office for the Day. If Twitter dies, we will use this podcast to tell journalists what site they can use to casually mention it's their birthday and also post again the next day to thank everyone for the birthday wishes. Thus inspiring yet another wave of attention. And finally, David, if Twitter dies, we will use this podcast to tell journalists where they can announce to the world that they are changing journalism jobs, but not actually mention what their next job is.

Promising only that they will have more to announce soon. I have a giant blank wall behind me. My wife and I were just trying to decide what was going to be on it for Zoom calls moving forward. If everybody wants to just donate a three-by-five printout of some personal news that they have going, Going forward, I'm happy to decorate my entire office with those. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to a near emergency edition of the press box. Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, producer Carlos Chiroboga sitting in for Erica. Last night, David, was a collective moment of media apocalypse like I think I've never seen.

I was texting you this morning. my wife and I were at a concert, and it was one of those concerts where they zap your phone, so it's deactivated. And I came out, I turned my phone on, and there were DMs from two different people with their contact information saying, I hope we can stay in touch. We will not be able to find each other in the morning. What was your first take on Twitter Apocalypse or near Apocalypse? It wasn't last night. I was almost entirely logged off last night, which makes me probably the worst person in the world to be having this conversation right now. But when I woke up this morning, just to dip into Twitter as I always do, to see what's going on in the world. It was just a lot of melancholy tweets from the night before. And scattered in there were a few, well, maybe this isn't as apocalyptic as I thought it was. But let's just, you know, make sure that we're in. combat mode in case, you know, we're ready for whatever happens because it seems inevitable.

It is weird. It's sort of like for the past couple of weeks, it's felt like the end of Twitter could be a reality in some ambiguous way. And then for whatever reason, it just gets really real, you know? It's like, it feels like, and I don't mean this, this parallel is probably offensive in so many ways, but it felt like during the rise of COVID-19, when we were still going to work every day, but the offices had like paper towels and hand sanitizer everywhere that like, you know, building staff would put out. And everybody was just sort of asking questions on the side, like, what does this mean? And you're trying to scour the news stories. It doesn't really make a lot of sense. And then there was one day where I heard from literally to completely the separate

sources, no overlap at all, that the NYPD or that the city might be closing down the bridges. And that was the day where I came up from work and I was like, Dom, we have to look. leave. I don't think this is true, but we still have to leave. It really did have that feeling of something happening. But what I think is interesting is that it flipped a little bit because when you and I were talking about the death of Twitter the other day, death was sort of meaning, will we want to be on this platform? If under Elon Musk there's way more misinformation, if Donald Trump. Trump comes back.

Sure. If Twitter just becomes a place you don't want to hang out in. Last night, it went to from that to Twitter is not going to work. It is going to go down tonight because if people didn't follow this, Elon Musk, the newish owner of Twitter said a deadline Thursday for Twitter employees. And he said essentially, you're either going to be extremely hardcore, quote unquote, and stay. where you're going to leave with three months severance. This was after he laid off 3,000 plus workers

out of Twitter's 7,500 person workforce. Not shockingly, a lot of people looked at that ultimatum and said, yeah, I'm out of here. I will take that three months severance rather than to continue to work for this company. By the way, that was another feature of last night, dude. The tech reporters, last night was like the NBA trade deadline for tech reporters.

like refresh refresh oh yeah my favorite was mike isaac in the new york times started a tweet with hey somebody's starting a tweet with hey it's probably not good news and then he wrote i thought things were bad but it's worse than you think yeah you're right i mean it went from a place that you thought you know the fear was it might not work in the sense that like it might not work the same way you might not be able to do the things you normally do on Twitter because of, for instance, you know, a title wave or, you know, of, of bad faith users from, you know, the more objectionable parts of the internet, right? You know, racist Twitter eggs and whatnot. And it went immediately to, oh, this might not, this just might not work, you know, it might not, like the buttons might not work. The app

might not open. The servers might be down, which is a whole different conversation. A lot of fail whale coming back bits on Twitter last night. Alex Heath at the Verde, speaking of tech reporters, tweeted this. Several members of Twitter's command center org, which I'm told must transition team identified as a linchpin that keeps Twitter operating day to day, resign today.

Also entire key infrastructure teams gone, not good. So there was this whole feeling that this site may just go down tonight, which then led to a very, what would you call it, pre-Snowpocalypse, pre-mediar hurtling toward Earth feeling on Twitter as people waited for the possible failure of the entire site. A couple of features of that. I told you about the contact info. I just want to make sure we can find each other on the flip side. Also, a lot of jokes about what your last tweet would be. Yeah. I want to make sure you get in the worst take possible on the site before the site goes down.

It's like the last day of school, the last day of summer camp. Or I don't even know what the right, maybe it's more like the last day of college because you all said, well, when we were in college, when you all, you all communicated through college email and you suddenly realize you're not just saying goodbye, but you're saying goodbye to your means of communication. So, yeah, it's somehow even worse than that. Mina Kimes had a good tweet about people you met on Twitter that sort of changed your life. It's kind of a happy category.

Sure. She mentioned Bill Barnwell. That's a sort of nice way to put it, right? Like, if we're all going to end this site, here are the people that we actually like. and that influenced us intellectually, professionally, in a good way. I saw Ben Solax, somebody said, best decision in your career, and he tweeted, unironically joining Twitter. Every single job opportunity I ever got was from being on Twitter,

learned how to write from Twitter, learned how football worked from Twitter. It's a scary place, but to me, it's been crucial. Yeah, I think a lot of people can, a lot of people can sympathize with that or see themselves in that. I think that we've all had our sort of ebbs and flows of Twitter usage or most of us have or connection to it. But I mean, at a bare minimum, Twitter has accomplished so much, if not directly, certainly indirectly in mine and everyone's career, right? I mean, just to sort of like keep you present to serve as in the early days, to serve as a

meter of your, you know, sort of cue rating or whatever, you know, and, and, and, and, and, to be able to get your name out there. I mean, it was, when I sold my book 10 years ago, it was on the back of my number of Twitter followers, not the downloads of my pieces or the, you know, I mean, that sort of the page views of my pieces or anything else, downloads a podcast,

it was about just Twitter followers. And so that was really significant. And it's always, and it's just always been, I mean, it's always been a means of communication. Like you said, DMs, the ability to communicate with people,

you know i mean i have literally like lost track of email personal my own personal email addresses since at least one maybe two since the advent of twitter you know and the twitter's kind of been there as the mainstay it's always the place that you can go and and um it's you know you do sort of realize this all at once when there's the threat of it disappearing the part about journalists losing their following is intimately wrapped up in the first of Twitter going away, is it not? Yeah, I mean, I was trying to think, how did we do this before? Right?

I mean, if you, this is, I mean, in some ways, we've talked about it in a million different directions, but this basic conversation, but Twitter did serve as sort of, you know, to serve to level the playing field in terms of quality and access from different outposts, right? I mean, you would start your career at one place and move to another place and move to another place. And usually it was in pursuit of better traffic. better traffic that the new platform would serve up for you, right? You might be perceived as

the best writer at New York Magazine or whatever, but that would be, you know, but your, the breadth of readership would largely be determined by New York Magazine. And your, and the quality of your writing was sort of more significant, it was more significantly, it was more significant that it mattered that like the people at New York Magazine thought you were a good writer, right, if that's where you worked. Because it wasn't like people were tearing out the page of the magazine and starring it and sending it back in, right? I mean, it was your career path was your own journey to find the right place and to get better exposure.

And then with Twitter, you could be the best writer at, you know, whatever, Brooklynblog.com or whatever and make a living doing that, you know? And if that was your own blog, if you work for another place, it was like more of a smaller operation and you were making them a lot of money, well, they could pay you appropriately to keep you sometimes, you know, because you, because you were still getting the same number or a representative number of page views that you could get at a bigger place. And we could track that stuff and people can see it, you know, and that's, that's really significant. And exposure to other writers is a really big thing too, because in the pre-intern, I mean, I know this is, this is separate

from Twitter to a large extent. But in the pre-internet era, your prospective employers only had so much space on their coffee table, right? I mean, they're not going to be exposed to every writer in the world unless somebody put something in their hands, which is what Twitter did,

put things in your hands or in front of your eyes. And, you know, the journey is just much more treacherous without platforms like Twitter to open it up. people always say the downside of Twitter is that everybody starts to sound the same, that you get this kind of Twitter consensus politically or otherwise,

and that it drives all writers to sort of write in the same stuff. But you're right, the exposure to the way other people write, not just other points of view, but just the particular way they put sentences together. That was possible when you and I started out in this business, but it just took a long time to find all that stuff. I'm going to talk about the newsstand era. I'm talking about just the internet era where you would just have to visit a dozen

homepages multiple times a day. Oh, yeah. To really feel like you, you know, took a sip of everything that was out there. And then all of a sudden, like, Twitter brings it all under one roof and you can follow the people you want to follow and wind up reading people you don't want to follow. Absolutely. That was just such a huge. such a huge change.

I do remember too, like, again, you and I slipped in during the internet era when the internet was the dominant place to read things,

but before social media, that there was just this switch that flipped. And it was like, oh my gosh, we are writers who are either really good at Twitter,

as it would come to be known, or are just really zealous about being salesman. will flourish in this new environment. That change you're talking about where basically you're like, I wrote a story and I hope this publication puts it in a prominent spot on their homepage or puts it on the cover of the magazine or whatever. And I hope I get it and promotes it.

And maybe I'll get a call from a radio or TV booking. That's how I will promote myself to I will can promote myself relentlessly on this new website. Yep. And a lot of times the people that will get ahead. are the people that are most willing to promote themselves or most eager to promote themselves on this website. Sure.

It was such a big change. This is Kevin Van Valkenberg of ESPN tweeting today. Twitter really has been the world's weirdest bar. You could chat or fight weirdos, Nazis, robots, comedians, athletes, musicians, politicians. You could make friends, watch sports, fall in love. It's a genuine shame it was bought by a man who wants it to be an e-commerce mall.

That from the one of the more positive points of view. We've got this question from listener Steve Criskey, David. Question for next week's inevitable Twitter segment. Shouldn't every media company already be working on incorporating a Twitter-like feed in their own apps?

Some probably already have something like this, but with contributors able to post directly to users. What do you think about that? Derek Thompson was on Bill's podcast. this week. I encourage everybody to listen to that. They haven't. And he pointed out that was sort of what the Facebook feed initially was. It was a rip-off of Twitter, right? The timeline in reverse chronological order. I mean, there's something very unique about Twitter in its simplicity. And if you go back in catalog, everybody's gripes about Twitter, even to the extent that you

were talking about, oh, the sort of sameness that comes from it, you know, the problems all seem so much more fixable in the light of the potential disappearance of Twitter, right? It's like, oh, well, like that complaint was not that big of a deal. You know, that's a thing that we can, we can deal with. We should make the effort to deal with it and not just yell at Twitter about it. But yeah, I mean, everybody's talking about the different alternatives that are already out there or that are in development. And I certainly think there's some space for one. And it's, it's interesting that no one is doing it, although, you know, Twitter wasn't making money. money. In fact, it was losing a lot of money. And as we're seeing right now, a Twitter

with half of its staff or less is not a functional Twitter. So it's a big investment, even though it seems just sort of like, you know, a message board with a slightly better with an algorithm built in. And also it's just like, I'm sure that everybody suggested this. Everybody's thought about this. And I think there's probably the big question of like, Well, I mean, we can make it work if we get 50% of Twitter's users or 75% would that be great. But like, you know, if Facebook and Facebook went in with Google and they were like, we are making new Twitter, would it get, would it get half of Twitter's users? Even if it were exactly the same? I mean, a lot of what makes, has made Twitter so effective is that it's not just the power users.

it's the sort of everybody, right? It's the sort of like people that sign up and then and then look at it for a month and then forget they have it and then they log back in two years later. And they, you know, I mean, it's the fact that like Facebook, it's like everybody's kind of there. And you're not going to get the same sort of, you're not going to get the same rate of usage. I mean, although everybody who's on Twitter are not going to go join the same place somewhere else. And if you don't get a lot of the same people, then it's not the same place because that's what made Twitter matter. It was all the people using it. Totally agree. I was talking to a journalist

on the phone right before we hopped on the day. We were talking about this idea that, look, when we talk about the audience that reads the ringer, the audience that reads every publication that's out there, no one is kidding themselves to say that that is an absolutely full sample of all the people that could potentially read your publication. The semaphore idea of all the English-speaking people in the world. What was their original conception of the site? Yeah.

It is going to be certain types of people. But the one thing about Twitter scale that you point out is at least it is that overlay, perhaps fictional overlay, that that idea that we are getting tons and tons of different kinds of people on here. Now, of course, we know that just being online at all, then being on Twitter, then using Twitter a lot, it's going to be a very, it's going to be certain segments of the reading public that's going to want to do that or be even be able to do that. Yes. But there's almost this illusion that it's a lot because the scale is so big that there are lots and kinds of people.

And if you went to another website and it was a quarter as many people and hate this many people have, it just would not have that illusion to all of us journalists, if that makes sense. David Mulhern or Dave Mulhern Listener said Could this be the final Overwork Twitter joke? This is when we were on the edge of apocalypse And his nominee was Y'all I'm too ugly to be relegated to Instagram

Same for David Knight by the way. So Twitter is probably not going to really die that is the take of Kara Swisher, whose takes I go to in times like these. She tweeted yesterday a few things. Depending on how much critical staff has left and where, it's possible, though not probable, the service could shut down at any time

and for a short or long time. Relax, as it used to do this a lot with the dreaded fail whale logo, see the old and new one, it usually restores. Swisher continues there are. alternatives like Mastodon, post news, LinkedIn, Insta, TikTok, but they're all different, and it's not easy to recreate your social network here elsewhere. In fact, you will not accept this. By the way, Twitter is not going away either. It may just get suckier. Yeah. So now we may be back to the first idea of the quote-unquote death of Twitter. Not is Twitter going to shut down tomorrow

and never appear again and where are we going to promote ourselves? We're going back to is this a place we want to be? Yeah. Is this going to be, you know, the kind of thing where you're like, well, there's lots of, there's lots upside to this, but do I want to be here at all? Yeah. And I mean, and that kind of goes the previous question about can people recreate Twitter.

Well, I mean, if Twitter never really dies, then certainly we're, no one is going to just succeed by being the Twitter backup plan. Right? This isn't like like a message boards, you know, 85 users moving over to another server. It's a good question. I mean, I think as long as it's limping along, like today, it'll probably hang on to some

extent. And then we're looking at not a new Twitter. We're looking at presumably a new platform, a new technology that'll eventually grab us all away. Although the traction that it has is really significant. I think it goes more centrally, really, to what Elon Musk's objective is here. no one can i don't think anyone can even assume presume to read the tea leaves but is the idea just to make twitter make you know to make a uh you know slimmer faster uh you know just more profitable

version of twitter but to keep it you know going and if it is to keep it going obviously a day like today is not going to be tolerated right i mean it's going to be they're going to be they're going to have to figure out a way to make it functional. Is the idea just to strip mine it or to, you know, try to make it profitable at all costs and then sell it again? Is the idea just to tank it for and hope that, I mean, there's an outside point of view that he could be, that he could tank it and hope that the, in hopes that the government would step in, you know, in hopes that it would be deemed too big to fail and he could figure out a way

to recoup his investment or make money by it becoming a, you know, a nationalized product. There are a lot of possibilities here. But if at the end of the day, the idea is either current ownership wants Twitter to succeed on any level, or they want it to be in a position to sell to someone who will make it succeed, then one has to imagine that it'll limp along and, you know,

continue on in some form or fashion. It's really hard to read all his moves over the last week plus and come up with a coherent answer to the question you just posed from the, you know, hey,

anybody can buy a checkmark. Yeah, not so much. That doesn't work. Let's stop that immediately. To the, let's gut half of our workforce. And then as we found out from the articles yesterday,

he was meeting with people apparently and saying, actually please don't resign and take that severance I offered you. Yeah. Because I need you to make this website work. This is from Zoe Schiffer, a platformer tweeting a few minutes before we went on the air. Email from Elon to the engineering team. Quote,

anyone who can actually write software, please report to the 10th floor at 2 p.m. today. Before doing so, please email me a bullet. point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past six months. Continuing, Elon Musk is asking for up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code from Twitter engineers. Just really amazing. So that doesn't seem great.

No. I mean, is it, it's, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, Carol Swisher in that, in that, in those tweets that you read compared Musk to Trump, she wasn't the first to do it, but she did it very, very directly. And I think, you know, one of the, one of the central questions of Trump's presidency

was the question of 40 chess, I guess, as it was, as it was, as it was, as it was, uh, termed a lot. Like how much of this was some just like really wild out there plan to achieve a sort of, you know, accomplished, left field accomplishment and how much of it was just, kind of mindlessness or autopilot or stupidity or whatever you want to say. It's similarly difficult to read into what Elon Musk has been doing at Twitter.

I mean, one can imagine the logic, tortured as it is, of saying, I'm just going to let everybody, I'm just going to come in tell everybody who doesn't want to be here, leave, and then I have everybody else in the palm of my hand because they chose to stay. I mean, that's sort of the public statement, right? that's what he is, yes, posturing. One could imagine that being his true point of view, but just also expecting that more people would stay than stayed, or that there was more of an autopilot built in to Twitter than apparently there is.

You know, I don't think any hedge fund that took over Twitter would have, I'm sure that any hedge fund that took over Twitter would probably try to half the workforce as well. I don't think that any of them would have gone about it in the same way. I think that's safe to say. So the whole thing is just a little bit, you know, perplexing. And I don't think anybody really knows. I mean, it sort of, as with Trump, the most coherent line of thought is that it is a sort of vanity play and that first and foremost and that everything else sort of follows from there, which is to say it doesn't have to follow really logically. But it's hard to read.

until we do get a reading on this, should we turn the Press Box podcast into a pirate radio feed? Yes, please. Kind of BBC World Service for journalists. If you have any questions about what you should do and where you should do it, tune in this podcast.

Dave and I will have the best answers we can for you. We do not want to miss any of your essential tweets. We want to make sure that there's a home for those. either on Twitter 2.0 or wherever we all wind up. Don't want journalists to ever be able to not share important information. We'll just leave this Zoom room open. Come hang out with us. Yeah.

Let's see what we come up with. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Carlos Chiroboga. Shoemaker, let's go back Monday. Twitter or No, with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then. See you later, Brian.