Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

When I saw this news, my first thought was that she lasted about 1 year and 11 months longer than I expected after the first few weeks.

I know Twitter had many terrible aspects, but I do miss the world voice old Twitter provided for quotes that could be engaged with in an "everyone is here" kind of feeling that doesn't exist on any other platforms right now.

Can you drill into "everyone is here"? Prior to twitterfiles, Twitter felt overly corporate .

I agree it's pivoted into another community. A lot of the mainstream and left leaning contributors have been downranked or moved to other platforms.

But Twitter hasn't felt like raw, egalitarian conversation since 2009

I think the “everyone is here” feeling is because the media outlets use it quite a bit. So even though mostly everyone is not on Twitter it felt like anyone who is anyone was on Twitter. I don’t really miss the FOMO that was intended to produce but I imagine if you played along it validated the FOMO some how.

To be honest though it is still by far the best place to get "news" about (very recent) current affairs. Obviously there is an incredible amount of disinformation on it, but if you can filter that out mentally (though I don't know how possible that is), you tend to get a far more 'real time' take on things.

Me and a friend were talking about this before - for big news stories I/we would instinctively put rolling news on. Now it's usually Twitter I check.

This is compounded by the fact that so many political events 'happen' on Twitter/X (and for Trump, Truth Social then screenshotted onto Twitter). Even without Trump I would say the majority of UK political 'intrigue' is done directly on twitter.

So I think it's actually the other way round; media outlets use it quite a bit because instead of press conferences and what not a lot of news comes straight onto it.

Btw, this isn't too say traditional journalism doesn't have a place - it absolutely does and most of the current affairs content I read is on that. But for 'fast moving' events Twitter has managed to keep its place in my eyes, which I'm surprised about to be honest. Bluesky does not have anywhere near the same momentum which really shows you how important network effects are.