How Elon Musk killed Twitter/ X

Twitter was a newswire. That, at least at first, was the point of it. Something that came with all the glamour of digital innovation was, as it turned out, immediately recognisable as a version of something that has sat on every newspaper news desk for decades: a regularly refreshed ‘feed’ of short updates, ceaselessly scrolling, with the latest at the top.

It was a newswire everybody got, and everybody could contribute to. There was value in that alone. It turned into much more. It became a raucous sort of community. It did, as everybody complained, make it easier for angry inadequates to shout at strangers, but that was just part of it. It was fun. If you wanted to identify that unusual bird’s egg, or settle a dispute about Jacobean handwriting, or canvass ideas on how to get a sponge out of the bottom of a decanter, or immediately share something that struck you as funny to an audience that might find it funny too, Twitter was a place to do it.