You don’t remember it because you’re very young, but there was a time when Twitter was the network where we all wanted to be, where we had to be, where you couldn’t not be, where you were even without wanting to be, because Twitter dominated the public conversation and you ended up reading tweets in newspapers and on television. You’re very young and you didn’t experience it, but years ago Twitter was an open place where you could talk, give your opinion constructively, meet good people, discover, learn, have fun, share what you were doing. It was all intelligence, humor and creativity; People wished you a good weekend and helped you find a job or an apartment. The best threads, the best memes, the best recommendations. Oh, it was also a tool to change the world, to denounce, protest, call for demonstrations. Nobody wanted to leave Twitter!
Okay, I went too far. Twitter wasn’t like this before Elon Musk, I know; but it was less toxic. So much so that we’ve even developed a nostalgia: a tweetstalgia which, like all nostalgia, is delicate, it idealizes the past. Before Musk, there was already noise, toxicity, misinformation, trolls, bots, zascas, harassment, anonymity, marketing with our personal data and an algorithm that pumped us full of dopamine to make us addicted. But there were also precious people, we could continue conversations, creators shared their work, we laughed often and we could ignore the assholes. It also served to inform you: with biases and echo chambers, yes, but the information circulated.
