Twitter Was Great

By Dave Michels

I am frequently asked how I built a career as an independent analyst. In this industry, most independents are alumni of research or consulting firms, leveraging a legacy brand to launch their own. My trajectory was different. I entered the space with an education and background in communications, but my path’s asset was timing. I entered the racket when blogs and Twitter were nascent, transformative forces. I began blogging as a hobby, but the content resonated.

During that period, the enterprise communications community on Twitter was a tight-knit community defined by high-level interactions. This momentum led to frequent contributions to the NoJitter media site and programs at VoiceCon. Then came invitations to major vendor events. My content strategy was a self-sustaining ecosystem: Twitter fueled the media sites, the media sites validated the blogs, and the invitations fed the depth of my blogs that brought me back to social engagement.

Decaying Blogs and Rising Gatekeepers

The path I took is effectively closed today. The three pillars: blogs, media sites, and Twitter are in various states of distress. The blog revolution was the democratization of the web from large media gatekeepers, but personal blogs lost their cultural luster years ago. The big media gatekeepers successfully reclaimed their dominance at the expense of the independent blogosphere. The death of Google Reader was a contributor as it was the Inbox of the Internet. Several RSS readers are available, but RSS is disappearing. Today, websites are a repository for existing clients; the website for discovery and lead-generation largely ended.

Traditional media sites are facing their own existential crisis. The ad-based revenue models that sustained them for decades are being starved by AI search responses that summarize content without driving traffic. Consequently, these sites are retreating behind aggressive paywalls, further isolating professional discourse into gated communities for paid subscribers only.

The Collapse of Twitter

The most painful shift has been the deterioration of social networks, specifically the fall of Twitter. Twitter’s original value proposition was elegant: if you follow interesting people, you get an interesting feed. I spent years curating a specialized stream of communications professionals, celebrities, and subject matter experts. Tools like TweetDeck allowed me to manage this firehose, separating rapid-fire industry updates from curated must-reads. It was the ultimate professional dashboard, it allowed me to generate traffic to my longer content, and I made valuable connections on Twitter. It didn’t take much effort to see the quality of one’s stream. Spammers were instantly blocked.

The acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk dismantled all of its utility. The verified checkmark, once a symbol of authenticity, became a simple subscription fee, stripped of its meaning. Tweets became longer and increasingly spammy. More critically, the algorithm replaced my curated feed with a logic favored engagement-bait. Suddenly, following someone was merely a suggestion to the AI, which prioritized sensationalism over relevance. I tried to endure, but then Tweetdeck was taken away from free users, and X became useless. I had about 40K followers when I abandoned Twitter, but many of them were already gone.

LinkedIn and the Microsoft Walled Garden

LinkedIn was the logical heir to professional discourse, but it is now deteriorating with alarming speed. Like X, LinkedIn’s algorithm now prioritizes negative sentiment, which I find receives about five times the impressions of neutral content. The platform transitioned from 60 minutes to the E! It’s less about networking and professional discussions and more aboud ads, gossip, and look-at-me posts. . Feeds are increasingly flooded with bot-written captions, deepfakes, and AI-generated images. Trust and authenticity are disappearing.

Microsoft’s ownership, once seen as hands-off, has become more cocerning, too. The integration of Copilot AI means that every professional post or comment is being harvested to train its AI models without granular user consent. There is also the issue of BrowserGate, where LinkedIn was accused of using hidden code to scan users’ systems for software and SaaS tools. While it is very hard for us users to find older content, I am sure Microsoft is harvesting all that data for AI training.

I wonder about the reach of my content when the platform owner is also a subject of my critique. LinkedIn allows users to control what’s visible and what’s private, but isn’t everything visible to Microsoft?

The End of Organic Social Listening

The transition from grassroots communities to paid-to-play platforms is complete. On both X and LinkedIn, organic reach is lost. I can’t easily see the content that I want to see, and people who follow me don’t see my content. A friend asked me recently why I stopped posting on LI? I haven’t! But, perhaps I should, because one issue is most people are unaware of how LI works. They generally assume that if they follow someone, they will see their content.

The old social media is gone, replaced by advertising platforms where the user/contributor is the product. For brands, the value of social listening is gone on X and LI. (survives on TikTok and YouTube). B2B companies have demoted social. Sprinklr, for example, pivoted just in time. It built a CCaaS on Social, but now its CX services are standalone, and they listen on Reddit.

The communications game board is completely changing. YouTube has become stronger than television broadcasters, and email is making a comeback. Neither overrides who users wish to follow. Newsletters, like this one, are rising in popularity. I started with one newsletter on Substack, and its recommendation engine keeps finding me great new content. It’s not the same though. I could consume hundreds of tweets a day, but not so for newsletters.

UP Next

Looks like the Magic Quadrants have started. The UCaaS one has been issued to providers, and the CCaaS one kicks off soon. I wonder if Microsoft Dynamics qualifies for the CCaaS report this year. Gartner observed that the two separate CX reports: Customer Engagement Center and CCaaS, were on a collision course last year. I assumed they were hinting at changing the inclusion criteria, but it appears the CEC vendors are adapting more toward CCaaS.

Today is the day for my interview with Jeff Lawson. We cover CX, CRM, and bulb vegetables.

David Danto is gearing up for Infocomm, and has published some compelling content lately. Check out The Bundling Conundrum that details collaboration hardware manufacturers that often go from rivals to roommates and back again. And also The Myth of the “Unequipped Room” that examines just what the TAM of video rooms systems is - and what exactly a room system is anymore. He also recently described the upcoming 25th anniversary of his collaboration networking in New York events (CAMP-NY) and why this form of industry camaraderie has been so important for everyone. (The next one is June 23rd if you want to experience one for yourself.)

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