Twitter took off because it is a journalism predigestion engine, and there's always someone saying something that you can make a headline out of.
You used to have to go out and talk to people to find out "people are saying", but that costs time and money, and local journalists were being culled hard.
With Twitter, you can can just choose and surface the juiciest, most unhinged takes and the clicks roll in. It's like crack for both sides.
The downside is it sane-washes the lunacy by promoting some guy, who used to be propping up the bar at the local pub and explaining his theories to anyone unlucky enough to sit nearby, to national news-worthy opinion-haver.
> With Twitter, you can can just choose and surface the juiciest, most unhinged takes and the clicks roll in.
I think that says a lot more about the media than Twitter itself. Yes, it built upon the concept, but TV reports have been doing the same thing ever since the invention of the vox pop.
Yes, it's not specifically Twitter's fault that it can be can used it to mass produce "both sides" and ragebait at near-zero marginal cost.
But IMO it's still a large part of why it took off. When it started in 2006, every media personality was almost immediately absolutely hooked on it. You couldn't move for columnists talking about what they'd seen there, gushing about how great it was and the news articles would embed anything that would get a click. Even my university newspaper had a satirical fake "what's happening on Twitter", mocking the overuse of Twitter as a source in news media. And that was the start of the academic year 2006-7: it was already a meme within the year of launch.
Yes, vox pops have been around since it was realised that the person on the street might have telegenic hot takes, but you have to pack up, go out to a specific place and interview enough people there to get all the takes you need. That's tens of thousands in gear, a minimum of two people (camera operator, interviewer) plus a stack of editing. Twitter just meant you could sift tens of thousands of takes, possibly from all over the world and select for the maximum engagement. And because the tweets could and did go national, every kook out there was posting madly in hopes of getting noticed.
You used to have to go out and talk to people to find out "people are saying", but that costs time and money, and local journalists were being culled hard.
With Twitter, you can can just choose and surface the juiciest, most unhinged takes and the clicks roll in. It's like crack for both sides.
The downside is it sane-washes the lunacy by promoting some guy, who used to be propping up the bar at the local pub and explaining his theories to anyone unlucky enough to sit nearby, to national news-worthy opinion-haver.