I want to talk about an article from the New York Times from April 18th, the day before I'm recording this show. It's an article from the New York Times Magazine written by an editor over there named Willie Staley, and it's titled "What was Twitter Anyway?" I don't typically love Twitter reporting as a self-critical reporting on Twitter.

I don't usually love that format. I don't always care what sort of in-the-weed Twitter users have to say about Twitter because I don't know. It's like talking to the alcoholic about the difference between different brown liquors and the buzz they create or something. It's like someone whose life is so involved in it, it can be kind of weird.

This article was great. It was a Twitter article. I was waiting for a journalist to write because I think it is incisive at getting at, here is how Twitter unfolded. Here is why me, reporter William Staley, and everyone I know is using this so much, and here's what's happening now, why that party is coming to an end.

I want to go through this and then react to it a little bit. Now, if Jesse was here, we would load this up on the screen. He's not here. I don't know how to use technology, so I have it printed out. I'm actually just going to be reading things.

You can, however, watch me reading this article at youtube.com/CalNewportMedia. This is episode 245. You can also find this episode at thedeeplife.com. If you just click on watch and go to episode 245, you'll find the video there as well. I have a couple of quotes I want to read. Let's start with who William Staley is.

As he says early in the article, "I am an editor at the New York Times Magazine, but I think it should be stated clearly up front that I have something of an acute problem with Twitter." He puts that up there right up front. He gives an interesting anecdote about getting involved in a pylon.

It was a little bit hard for me to follow, but I think what happened here is that La Crusade that makes the enameled cast iron cookware famous for wedding registries everywhere, sort of expensive French cookware, had advertised something about Star Wars themed La Crusade cookware. He thought that was incongruous.

He thinks about that as something that people who are really refined people into cooking care about, and Star Wars he thinks about maybe comic book geeks. He wrote a tweet that said, "The Star Wars La Crusade pots imply the existence of a type of guy I find genuinely unimaginable." He sent it, went back to work.

Then around lunchtime, he says, things started happening. He talks about this huge pylon of people quote tweeting again and again, all of them pointing out problems with this tweet that he sent, such as, "I enjoyed that this tweet manages to be sexist on multiple levels. Newsflash, women cook and like Star Wars.

Imagine a woman. Hi, have you met women? Women like Star Wars, men cook. My husband is a huge Star Wars fan and is the cook in the house. He bakes too. Sorry to blow your mind." And onward and onward and onward for a couple of days. He pointed out this is not a major thing, right?

Here's how he describes it. It was low effort clowning that felt charged only because it was traveling along such high energy vectors, sexism, homophobia, Star Wars fandom. The platform can coax this exact sort of response out of its users with an incredibly small amount of effort. It's only on the receiving end where all these messages collect in one place that it feels oppressive.

That's actually really good writing by the way. It was charged only because it was traveling along such high energy vectors, small amount of effort, but on the receiving end, they collect, it feels oppressive. I like that. Very clear writing. He says you could in this situation quit or turn off Twitter, but he says in theory, you can just log on, wait for it to end, but no one does that.

All right. So I think right up front, we get an interesting and I think incredibly apt description of what is this pile on dynamic that dominates Twitter at the moment. It's this notion of things get put out there and then they can very quickly, people can take turns and test things out and see if they can gather attention with who can clown or dunk on the person even better.

And they have a certain energy to them because they often, in order to gain attention for my dunk to perhaps gain the applause of others, if you can connect it to what he calls a high charge vector, that is successful. But for me sending that out, I'm just saying like, let me try something here.

This guy talking about Star Wars, let me try something here, connect to this or that, maybe it'll get some applause. Very little effort, but for the person on the receiving end, it all adds up and disproportionately, it feels like your whole world is coming, collapsing in on you. So I thought that was a really apt decision of what it's like to be on Twitter right now.

So he's like, that's what Twitter, this is sort of what Twitter has been like recently. And then he says, then we get the Musk's takeover of the platform. And he says, this has strained the sense of conviviality that made Twitter feel like a party in the first place. The site feels a little emptier, though certainly not dead.

Most like the part, more like the part of the dinner party where only the serious drinkers remain. Whiskey is being poured into the wine glasses. He steps back and has sort of ends this section with reflection. What exactly have we been doing here for the last decade and a half?

All right, so that's the setup to this piece. He's about now to go into the evolution of Twitter, how it got to this place. But I think this is a very accurate sense of the last year. Twitter had become this place where this is one of the primary interactions happening as a sort of often mild, sometimes intense pile on type of dynamic of quote tweeting and trying to dunk on each other, typically trying to dunk on your ideological enemies or dunking on someone in such a way that signals your, the approval might solicit the approval of your, your crowd or signal that you're a dunking on a representative of the enemy crowd.

And as, as Musk took over and journalists who don't like Musk have been leaving Twitter, then it's been having this sort of empty sense of like, it's still going on, but some of the, the marquee names that really put an energy into what's going on because these big name reporters and personalities are on here as they sort of leave.

It's not many people, but it creates an outsized effect. And I think all that is true. I think that's a really good description of what Twitter feels like. I think it really is true right now that even just a small amount of sort of these mainstream news organizations and reporters and personalities moving away from Twitter does give it that into the dinner party feel you're still there.

You're still pouring your drink, but the table's not as full and it changes the mood a little bit. All right. Staley then goes on to give a history, which I'm going to very briefly just hit on some highlights. So he talks about how it got started. Jack Dorsey wanted to call it status or statuses.

And Dorsey was really keen on this idea that the point of Twitter is to report what your status is. I am doing this. I feel like this, right? That was the original idea of Twitter. He got into an ideological battle with Evan Williams when he got involved with the company as well, where Williams thought this should be, people should be tweeting about stuff that's happening.

And Dorsey said, no, it should be tweeting about me, what's happening to me. And so the famous example was if there's a fire over at some address is the tweet, I am seeing a fire at this address or is the tweet, there is a fire at this address. According to Staley, Williams was a big fan of the opposite of the ladder.

And Dorsey was a big fan of the former Williams won that out. And the prompt changed from how are you feeling or whatever to what's happening. And a big turning point there was actually the miracle on the Hudson. There's someone, the tweets around that news event, Sully Sullenberger landing that Airbus A380 on or A330 probably landing that on the Hudson and how the tweets were more informative than the formal news was sort of this turning point of wait a second, this can be a place to actually discuss what's happening, not just what's happening to you.

So that was a big change. The next big bullet point comes in 2009. Here's a key quote. Twitter's takeover of the media class was rapid. In April 2009, Maureen Downe interviewed Williams and Stone, telling them that she would rather be tied up to stakes in the Kalahari Desert, have honey poured over me and red ants eat out my eyes than open a Twitter account; she signed up three months later to promote her column.

Another good sentence. And then it became, I'm quoting Staley here, absolutely irresistible to journalists. Okay. So, this is another big turning point. People were starting to use Twitter to talk about things that were happening and ideas that were interesting, not just what they felt like or what was happening to them.

It was no longer the Facebook status. It was a micro blogging type platform. This became very appealing to journalists. And now you get all the journalists on there because information and articles are being passed along and they want to know what is happening. There was around this time, and I'm quoting here, an enormous expansion in web media with Buzzfeed, Vice, and others pouring truckloads of venture capital into the field.

And though Twitter never drove much traffic, it was nevertheless important for journalists to be there because everyone else was there. This was where your articles would be read and digested by your peers and betters. It was doubly important because of how precarious these new jobs were. Your Twitter profile was your calling card, potentially a life raft to a new job.

The platform was an extremely fraught sort of LinkedIn, one you would use publicly to waste company time. So that's the next phase of Twitter is we have all the journalists get on there. They want to know what's going on. They want to promote their own articles. They want to be a part of the conversation.

They wanted to build up some sort of new media credibility that they could use if their venture backed web based mobile news startup failed, that they could point towards, I've got these followers and make it easier for them to land at a new publication. Once all the journalists were on there, this again changed the character of Twitter.

So here's Staley. But this journalistic swarming instinct made Twitter an ideal place for activists to get a message out. So once we figured out, wait, the journalists are on here and they're getting story ideas from here and they're quoting tweets in their articles and they're using, since they're on here trying to promote their things and what other people are writing, trying to see what news is going on, they might want to write about.

It is as if there was a single bar in Manhattan where all of the top editors of the main newspapers 50 years ago were all gathering to drink every night. If that happened, then if you wanted to spread some news, you would go hang out at that bar. Twitter became that bar.

And this is where we began to get more of this activist energy. And I'm using activists in the general sense here, anyone who had some sort of message to spread. And a lot of this was beneficial. A lot of this was actually grassroots message spreading, but also anyone who had an ax to grind or an ideology that they were obsessed about.

So then it became a place to try to influence the public sphere. It was still useful for people to be on here. Here's a quote. "If you're good at this game, it could be good for you both on Twitter and off. People got commissions and book deals. Not many, but enough.

Some people lost their jobs. Not many, but enough. A couple of people got TV shows out of it. Once someone told a story so wild, it was turned to a feature film. Hell, one guy even went and got himself elected president." But after a while, this focus, and obviously Trump probably pushed this the last bit of the way towards this new configuration, but this focus is what in the last four or five years turned Twitter into the Coliseum, the way I've been describing it in most of my recent talks about this.

Now that all the journalists were on there, now this is where the agenda was being set. Now this is where ideas were being tested and the feedback could sway how companies operated and how things were reported. This importance that was concentrated into this one homogenized social internet tool inevitably turned it into a Coliseum.

And it became a battleground. You're either one of the 1% of users responsible for 75% of the tweets waging war on here, the ultimate ideological, and I mean that not just politically, gladiatorial battlefield. And you had to take down and dunk on your enemies. And you also had to be very careful about curtailing your near allies to make sure that the proverbial or conceptual Overton window did not shift even a little bit.

So if someone shifted a little bit on the Overton window, you had to get everyone on that person fast because a little shift is how Overton windows make big moves over time. It wasn't the guy saying the crazy thing. It was the professor who's more or less aligned with you that's like, "Hey, maybe you have some questions about this." No, no, no, no.

We got to get on that because this is where sense is being made. And William Staley, editor from the New York Times Magazine is on here and he's going to see that and it's going to affect what they say or don't say in the magazine. And all this was happening from all sides on all sorts of issues, political, non-political, sports, entertainment, whatever it was.

Then it became the Coliseum. And for the last three to four years, the primary, I think, addictive quality of Twitter for the average user, which is not one of these reporters, not one of these partisans, but a non-posting observer, is that it's fun to watch important people hit each other with sticks and to say, "Ooh, this guy ducked under it, spun around and escaped.

This guy got nailed in the head and then everyone else swarmed on him. He never got up. This guy was like the final battle against Magwa at the end of Last of the Mohicans where he swung his hatchet in the older, wiser man with his sword, somersaulted under the hatchet, spun backhand sword to the back, right through the spine." You got to watch the final scenes of Last of the Mohicans.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, Michael Mann, all right, we're talking DDL, Daniel Day-Lewis, must watch. You can find it online. And then that's what it became. And that was inevitable. And then Musk took over. And when Musk took over, the journalist, especially for the mainstream left-leaning journalist said, "This party, we're at this nice dinner party." And it was getting kind of raucous.

And then the host said, "By the way, I sold my apartment to someone you don't like and now it's his dinner party." And so they're like, "We're going to kind of leave." And that's where we are now. And we find this question, what was Twitter anyway, being the headline?

And my response to all of this, beyond just saying this is a well-written, very perceptive article, and I really enjoyed it. The link is in the show notes and I recommend it. My response to all of this is, and I say this with all modesty, I told you so.

I've been saying this for years. As one of the few people who is orbiting this world, but has never been an active Twitter user, I'm telling you from the outside, this metaphorical dinner party got weird a long time ago. This metaphorical dinner party became less an Algonquin round table and more shades of eyes wide shut.

It's weird. The rich guys are putting on masks. I don't know what's happening here, but it's weird that you're defending this so strong. I mean, it's not the worst thing in the world, but why is everyone using this? Why were so many editors and journalists and academics saying, "Of course I have to be on here." I was like, "No, you don't.

This is weird." It's entertaining, but this is weird. This should be much more niche than it is. I used to say, and I stand by it, Twitter should have been like Game of Thrones, something that a non-trivial group of people were very into, but most people could care less.

It somehow fought above its weight class. Again, this is yet another example from news reporting I've been talking about in recent weeks where I'm glad to see this sort of retrospective distancing from this platform. I don't think it's evil and I don't think you're bad if you use it.

I just do not think it should be ubiquitous. I do not think it should be necessary, a precondition to be part of the conversation. I was so happy to see the Washington Post move their nationals coverage off of live tweets and into really nicely designed websites. I was happy a couple of weeks ago when I talked about, for whatever reason they did it, NPR saying, "We're not tweeting news.

Come back to NPR." I think this is all healthier. I think we're going to see more and more retrospectives like William or Willie Staley's where people look back and say, "Not my proudest moment, what I was doing on there." Not as essential as I was telling everyone that it was.

I think the haze is lifting. I think the fog is dissipating and we're going to gain back hopefully a more diverse, grounded public discourse. So let's knock on wood. But that was a great article. It was a good history. I think seeing Twitter's evolution in those phases, that was interesting.

It's not something I'd seen before laid out so clearly. So check that out and hopefully join me in my cautious optimism that Twitter's not going away, but it's no longer being mistaken for the town square. We now see that it's devolved into a coliseum. I want to see the demolition derby sometimes, but I don't want the demolition derby to be at the core of how the discourse...