A bird out of hand: My reminiscences on the rise and fall of Twitter.
Twitter should be destroyed. It should not exist anywhere, at any time, in any incarnation. It is evil.
Last month (March 2026) was the 20th anniversary of the first tweet. For the record, it was by company founder Jack Dorsey, who wrote on March 21, 2006, “just setting up my twttr.” Few technology products have proven so consequential in American society and politics over the last two decades than Twitter, which I refuse to call by its ridiculous new name “X.” Not long ago I was going back through my old archived posts on the Wordpress-era SeanMunger.com blog, and I found an article I wrote in October 2017 specifically about Twitter and its extraordinary devolution. Nine years on from that, I was shocked to find how quaint it was. I thought I would share that article, in its entirety, with you here. It’s anachronistic, and given what’s happened to Twitter and the whole state of online discourse in the years since 2017 it seems almost naïve. But, for what it’s worth, here it is.
Just by way of explanation: I gave up Twitter long ago. I would never in a million years dream of going back there for any reason. Apparently in 2017 I was reluctant to do so and still held out hope that it might get better, so you’ll see me making pathetic excuses for not dumping it. After I present the article as I wrote it then, I’ll chime back in with some contemporary commentary at the end. Let’s just say that the 20th anniversary of the first tweet is now something of a nefarious observance, like marking the 20th anniversary of Pearl Harbor or 9/11 or some particularly horrific murder. History will not be kind to Twitter, I think. Anyway, here is what I thought then.
October 11, 2017
This is harder for me to say than it should be: I am not liking Twitter lately. I mean, I’m really not liking it. I’ve given some thought to leaving the platform, which is a big decision because, as a blogger and a writer, Twitter is my primary outlet for publicizing my work. I’m basically not sure what to do about it. But I am sure of one thing: Twitter sucks, and it has devolved a great deal since the time I joined it. I thought it was worth at least talking about the reasons for its decline.
This is going to be a long read. Bear with me.
