Twitter may be officially called X now, but that rebranding is just one of the many changes that have hit the platform since Elon Musk took over. It’s been one whole year since the mercurial billionaire purchased Twitter, and in that time the social platform has undergone big shifts in its user base, business model, and culture. It’s become chaotic and unpredictable—some would also say it’s grown more dangerous—yet even among all this upheaval, Twitter keeps on tweetin’.
This week on Gadget Lab, we’re commemorating the one-year anniversary of a Muskified Twitter. WIRED senior writer Kate Knibbs and Vox senior correspondent and host of the Land of the Giants podcast Peter Kafka join the show to talk about all the weirdness Twitter has gone through over the past year, and whether the platform is still as relevant as it once was.
Show Notes
Listen to season seven of the Land of the Giants podcast, “The Twitter Fantasy.” Read Kate’s “Unverify Me, Daddy” story. Follow all WIRED’s coverage of the X (née Twitter) saga.
Recommendations
Kate Recommends the book Do You Remember Being Born? by Shean Michaels. Peter recommends the book Leave the World Behind by Jenna Pick, and also the show What We Do in the Shadows. Mike recommends the 1990 film Pump Up the Volume with Christain Slater and Samantha Mathis. Lauren recommends the second episode of the Land of the Giants: The Twitter Fantasy podcast she cohosts.
Peter Kafka can be found on social media @pkafka. Kate Knibbs is @Knibbs. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
How to Listen
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Lauren Goode: Mike.
Michael Calore: Lauren.
Lauren Goode: Did you celebrate the big event this week?
Michael Calore: Halloween?
Lauren Goode: No, not that one. There’s something else.
Michael Calore: Oh yes. Dia de los Muertos.
Lauren Goode: No. I mean, yes, that happened this week too, but that’s not what this podcast is about.
Michael Calore: I give up,
Lauren Goode: Did you celebrate the one-year Muskiversary on October 27th? It’s been one year since Elon Musk acquired Twitter.
Michael Calore: Oh boy. No, that passed me by, but that’s good to hear because that means we get to stop talking about it, right?
Lauren Goode: No, it means we’re going to do one more episode at least on Twitter. We’re finally going to pour one out for Twitter. We’ve brought in a stellar lineup of guests and we’re going to talk about what comes next.
Michael Calore: All right, let’s do it.
Lauren Goode: Let’s do it.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]
Lauren Goode: Hi everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I’m Lauren Goode. I’m a senior writer at WIRED.
Michael Calore: And I am Michael Calore. I’m a senior editor at WIRED.
Lauren Goode: We’ve got two guests for you today, which I guess means we’re officially making Gadget Lab a round table. Welcome, Kate Knibbs, senior writer at WIRED, who’s joining us from Chicago and is a longtime friend of the pod.
Kate Knibbs: Thanks for having me back.
Lauren Goode: And another special guest today, Peter Kafka, one of the media industry’s most respected reporters joining us from Recode in New York. Peter is also the host of the Recode Media Podcast and he and I worked on a little podcast together this year called Land of the Giants, which we’re going to talk about. Welcome Peter to the Gadget Lab.
Peter Kafka: Thank you, past and current coworker. Nice to see you again. I’ve been watching Lauren tape lines remotely for the last several weeks. It’s been quite entertaining. She’s great.
Lauren Goode: I’ve learned a lot of great tips from Peter, by the way, on podcasting, including, “Don’t look at the script. Just look away.” So I’m trying to look away as much as possible. So, yes, we are talking about Twitter again today, one year under Elon Musk, and we’re going to break this episode down into two parts. First, we’re going to talk about the business of Twitter. How has Twitter actually fared under Elon Musk and current CEO Linda Yaccarino? And then we’re going to talk about some of the key moments on Twitter throughout the years and whether any of the other text-based social media apps hold up. So first, Peter, what do we need to know about Twitter’s actual business over the past year? How’s it doing?
Peter Kafka: It’s not good. It’s not good, Bob. That was the easiest projection to make. Before Elon officially bought Twitter, somewhere between him announcing he was going to buy Twitter, and then while he was spending a lot of time trying not to buy Twitter, he put out a business plan to investors. And you can imagine air quotes around business plan, because it just looked like something that someone had drawn in the middle of the night if they’d never used Twitter before or they’d heard about Twitter. It had crazy projections like it was going to increase the user base from 200 million to a billion in X number of years, and all this money. Just none of it had any bearing on reality and that to me was the sign that this guy who has lots of skills and has pulled off lots of things in the past, some of which are genuinely impressive, had literally no idea what he was doing when he was going to buy Twitter. And he’s proven it out.
So revenue down 50% because advertisers are fled the platform. I mean almost all of them are gone. Users, there’s a lot of different numbers about how many users have stuck around, but it appears that he has lost users. He’s probably gained some Elon stans as well. I think Twitter officially says basically their user base is around the same, but you can’t really trust what comes out of Twitter these days. Lots of estimates have downloads, activity down, 15, 20%. And that, I think if you’re people who listen to Gadget Lab, you might see some of that when you’re on Twitter. Sorry, X. Sorry, Twitter. There’s just obviously a lot less engagement, for at least people like us. And we can talk about there’s multiple Twitter user bases and we should talk about that at some point. But it’s about as bad as everyone thought it would be. The most recent data point internally from Twitter is they valued the company at $19 billion. That’s down from the $44 billion he paid for it a year ago. That’s probably actually too generous. Fidelity has it worth around 15, and I think if he actually tried to sell it today, it’d be worth even less than that.
How’s that for a capsule summary?
Lauren Goode: Well, that’s our show for today.
Peter Kafka: Yeah, good.
Lauren Goode: Thanks so much. Find you on Threads.
Michael Calore: Probably the biggest shift that all of us noticed first is the shift to paid subscriptions for blue check mark verification. It is no longer the option to get a blue check mark just for being a person in the world who can verify their identity. Now you have to pay for it. How is that going?
Peter Kafka: Man, you have to go back and it’s so funny to remember all the hubbub around paid checks at the initial entrance. And now we’re seeing why there were a problem. That doesn’t seem to be going very well is the short answer. There are various numbers about how many blue checks are out there, paid blue checks are out there. It’s not very many. I will say that this is something Elon has consistently talked about. He does a lot of on the fly thinking and reversals. He has from the beginning talked about wanting Twitter to be a paid service in various forms and basically making it a freemium service where there’d be a crappy free version and a good paid one. And he’s continuing to push toward that, I think really ineptly.
It’s also worth noting that there’s a bunch of smart people who think paid social networks are actually a good idea, that they solve a lot of problems that social networks have today. But he’s going about it in the worst way possible, which is saying, “We’re going to sort of take the worst users on Twitter and elevate their responses and replies and posts and thus drive out the people on Twitter who don’t want to pay for a subscription,” who also happened to be a lot of the people that Elon really wants to impress. So, again, about as badly as you could roll this thing out.
Lauren Goode: Kate, you wrote a piece for WIRED with the glorious headline, “Unverify Me Daddy,” with regards to Musk’s subscription scheme. And you basically said, “You’re not getting my $8. Unverify me. I don’t care.” I’m wondering if you have any regrets on not being verified and what the experience has been like for you on Twitter now that you don’t have a blue check.
Kate Knibbs: So after I wrote that piece, I definitely had a moment where I wondered if I was about to look like a major fool a month or two later when I inevitably caved and bought a blue check mark, because I was concerned about it destroying the efficacy of Twitter for me as a reporter. I still find sources on Twitter, to this day, pretty frequently, and I will say it is annoying now that sometimes I can’t DM them. I have to Google around for their email address or a different way to contact them because some people have DMs turned off unless the DMer is verified. I did have some doubts, for a moment. But honestly I think that piece holds up really well because I think it’s very apparent to everyone, as Peter was saying, what the issue with this scheme was. The check mark has completely lost any value. Now it is a symbol that you’ve made a poor financial decision, that you’re gullible, that you’re untrustworthy.
Michael Calore: And so thirsty. So thirsty.
Kate Knibbs: It went from, I mean, look, I’m going to be honest here. It was never actually cool to be verified.
Lauren Goode: The truth comes out
Kate Knibbs: In the same way that reporters aren’t the coolest group of people, it was never actually as cool as maybe we wanted it to be to be verified. But it was helpful for news organizations. It was helpful. It was something that did make using Twitter more effective overall. Even for people who weren’t verified who used it as a news source, the verified badges used to indicate that an account was at least somewhat trustworthy. Now it means the opposite.
I’m glad I’m not verified. I’m never getting verified. Although I am honestly overall still a little bit in mourning about the Muskification of Twitter. And again, this doesn’t make me cool, but I’m being honest. It was my favorite social network for a long time. I’m still on it because I feel like I can’t give it up. I think I’m still clinging to hope that it’s going to be fixed. But will I ever pay for verification? No. I can confidently say I will not.
Are you guys verified? Am I accidentally being a huge bitch to you?
Michael Calore: No.
Lauren Goode: No.
Peter Kafka: Kate, I am so on board with you that I won’t even beg. I asked Facebook/Meta to verify me on Threads when it first rolled out and they wouldn’t. And just as a matter of pique, I refuse to ask them to redo it again. So I’m going to-
Lauren Goode: Peter, you don’t even have a profile photo on threads. It really disturbs me.
Peter Kafka: I love the fact that it freaks people like you, a couple other antisocial weirdos, out.
Lauren Goode: Just add a photo. What are you doing?
Peter Kafka: There’s plenty of photos of me available on the internet if you want to know what I look like. My Twitter handle is a cartoon monkey, so I don’t think we need my photo. But by the way, I got to enforce this. You could see Musk’s miscalculation with this. He assumed that the journalists who used Twitter would, one, obviously stay there, and then obviously they’d want to pay for their blue checks because he thought they meant a lot to us. Just fundamental miscalculation after miscalculation about how other people use Twitter. Elon Musk views Twitter as he is Twitter’s biggest power user. He assumes everyone else has the same views about Twitter that he does and he’s markedly off.
Michael Calore: And I think a lot of journalists assume that everybody has the same views about Twitter as they do, and politicians, but it’s obvious that that’s not true. Even if the user numbers are going up or going down there are a lot of people who are on Twitter and continue to use it as though absolutely nothing has changed. These vast communities of people that are tight-knit anyway, that all they do is really talk to each other and share memes.
Lauren Goode: Or crypto tips
Michael Calore: Or crypto tips. I think everybody listening and everybody here knows at least one community that they’re a part of on Twitter where it’s just business as usual for the last year.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, so who’s still there? Peter, you referenced some of these communities earlier. Who’s there?
Peter Kafka: So here’s two groups I think about a lot. One, I’m friends with some people who are in the video game business and they tell me that’s where they communicate with their customers and fans, et cetera, and they don’t notice any drop off there. And then, Lauren, the episode of *Land of the Giants: The Twitter fantasy*, that you and I are putting out this week talks a lot to lots of different communities of users. The one community that we talk to a lot in particular is Black Twitter, sort of Twitter’s best known homegrown community, I think. And repeatedly throughout the interviews we did for that series, we’d ask Black users of Twitter, “Are you leaving under Elon? What’s different under Elon?” And they might have complaints, but generally the vibe was, “We’re not going anywhere.” And in some cases they were explicit about it and said, “Elon Musk may want us to leave, but this is our space that we’ve built for ourselves, so we have no intention of leaving,” which was an interesting perspective.
Lauren Goode: Absolutely. And that’s actually what the episode is about. It’s about how the users created Twitter. Twitter in the early days in particular was so clunky and so just sort of foreign to the average social media user that it was a lot of users who got on and started using things like the hashtag or the at symbol or finding different communities and subgroups to build it up into what it was. And before we go to break, I just want to ask both both of you, Peter and Kate, a quick question, which is why should anyone care about Twitter right now? Why should we? How culturally significant is it?
Kate Knibbs: I think it’s still incredibly culturally significant because there’s nothing that’s risen up to replace it. The closest thing is TikTok, but it’s fundamentally a different medium. It’s how many people get their news. It’s how news is disseminated. And sometimes it’s how news is made when celebrities or political figures come on there to make public statements. Even though it was never as big as Facebook I think it’s significance as, it was never a public square, but as a amplification machine, can’t really be overstated.
Michael Calore: Yeah, I think because lots of people in power in particular are still reflexively using, people in politics. We saw this after the October 7th attacks in Israel. The IDF, Supreme Leader of Iran, the people from Hamas, were all tweeting. That said, I mean, I do think we’ve all overstated Twitter’s use because we all love Twitter so much. I think that from what again I’ve been told is that Telegram is much more important than Twitter and both the Russia-Ukraine coverage and information, and again in Israel and Gaza, that’s where most information is coming from. Which by the way is not a bad thing, if we live in a world where Twitter is replaced by multiple other social networks, I think.
Lauren Goode: On that note, let’s take a quick break and when we come back we’re going to talk more about the culture of Twitter.
[Break]
Lauren Goode: Kate Knibbs, you mentioned in the first half of the show that you’re still mourning Twitter a little bit, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to pour one out for Twitter, for each of us to rehash some of our favorite moments on Twitter, or maybe just share a story that you think is really emblematic of what Twitter was in its heyday. So, Kate, I’ll start with you. What’s that moment for you?
Kate Knibbs: I feel like it’s hard to pick just one because my favorite moments that are related to Twitter was when there was a public event happening in the real world and I was sort of using Twitter as a way to get real time reactions from so many different people. The most recent example I can think of, where I had fun with it was the Oscars where Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, which I don’t condone violence, but I had a blast that night watching everyone’s reactions.
There’s a communal vibe that I loved. And I agree that it’s not the worst thing in the world if Twitter is replaced by a variety of different platforms. It’s probably the healthiest thing. But I will miss sort of feeling like I have a sense of what the world’s response is to something as it’s happening. And I don’t know, part of me does hope that something emerges to give me that sensation again in the future. And that it’s not TikTok, because I love TikTok, but I can’t really bring myself to turn my camera on and freestyle a video response. I think I’m just too old or something. Give me a text-based platform, for the love of God.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, that’s another thing we haven’t really talked about is how our bias as journalists is probably slightly towards text-based social media. Peter?
Peter Kafka: Slightly. Slightly, yeah.
Lauren Goode: Ever so slightly. Peter, what’s yours?
Peter Kafka: Like Kate, the slap was great. Because, again, it wasn’t just people’s reaction to the slap, it was that’s where you would go on and you’d see someone had a stream from Australian ABC that had much better coverage of the actual slap than you were getting from the feed on American TV. And that was the kind of thing you just got used to on Twitter like, “Oh, something happened. I want to learn more about it. I also want to participate in the dunks and whatever else and the commentary, but also where can I get more information immediately?” And Twitter came through really well.
And the flip side of that, or the other side of that coin I guess, is early Twitter for me, and I was on very early when I almost thought of Twitter as a New York based company because there were so many investors and tech people from New York that were connected to it. It’s where all these people that I was writing about would go on and talk all night long and talk about what they were investing in, talk about companies they were visiting. I was like, “This is amazing. This is amazing reporting tool.” Almost all of them quickly wised up and realized they should not be engaging in Twitter that way unless they were promoting it themselves. And all of those guys, and they were almost all guys, totally bailed on Twitter some number of years later. But it was a really useful reporting tool for a specific period of time. Then it became a bad reporting tool. Then it became a way to just write about what everyone else was tweeting about, which wasn’t very helpful.
Lauren Goode: Mike, how about you? SnackFight, which is your Twitter handle and is how you are forever known now?
Michael Calore: It’s my handle everywhere. I think back to South by Southwest 2007. So I was working here. I think I had just been promoted to Editor, so I wasn’t there, I didn’t go. But here was this tool that all of a sudden had appeared basically overnight that allowed me to feel like I was there and it gave me this sense of presence. And granted, the chatter happening on Twitter in 2007, if you remember, was like, “Where are all the good tacos? Has anybody seen Dave? Does anybody know which taco place Dave went to?” That was the extent of the discourse.
Lauren Goode: Is that like Dave Morin or something or just Dave?
Michael Calore: No, I think it was probably Dave Weiner.
Lauren Goode: Oh, OK.
Michael Calore: But just that kind of thing where it was like this is where everybody’s hanging out and it’s like this big open text thread. It was very strange. And it was pre-mobile phones? I think maybe the first year with mobile phones was the following year, 2008.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. But you could use Twitter just with SMS.
Michael Calore: With SMS, right.
Lauren Goode: Yes.
Michael Calore: What I meant was smartphones.
Lauren Goode: Yeah.
Michael Calore: Sorry, yes. So everybody was walking around Austin SMSing each other, and I was sitting here in the office watching the stream go by and I was like, “This is amazing.” I just felt so plugged in, even though I was 2000 miles away. I would say my other big memories, and probably the thing I’m going to miss because I don’t really do it the same way anymore, is live tweeting concerts. So there’s a live stream concert or you’re at a concert and you’re live tweeting it and you’re watching the peanut gallery flow by while the band is on stage. That’s pretty awesome. That’s largely moved to Reddit.
Lauren Goode: So all the Phishheads are on Reddit now is what you’re telling me.
Michael Calore: There’s actually a lot of the Phishheads are still on Twitter, but there is also a very vibrant.
Kate Knibbs: Mike, people are at concerts on Reddit? Like posting?
Michael Calore: Yeah. Yeah.
Peter Kafka: I was having a hard time getting my head around it too until Mike mentioned Phish. I’m like, “Oh, that’s a very specific collector mindset.” Right?
Michael Calore: It is.
Peter Kafka: They haven’t played this song since this thing. I got it.
Michael Calore: Yes.
Lauren Goode: I wish our podcast audience could see Kate’s face right now.
Peter Kafka: Look, it’s way less bad than the person in front of you holding up their camera to livestream or photograph it, right?
Michael Calore: Yes.
Peter Kafka: If Mike and his friends want to tap away quietly while Trey’s noodling out, great.
Kate Knibbs: It’s very sweet. It’s very sweet. It’s adorable.
Michael Calore: It is.
Kate Knibbs: I love it.
Lauren Goode: The Phishheads.
Kate Knibbs: Love that for you.
Lauren Goode: How many Phish concerts have you been to?
Michael Calore: I don’t know. I lost count after 100.
Lauren Goode: And how many of those of you said you’ve spent on Twitter?
Michael Calore: Well, I mean there is the whole thing where you sit on your couch and you watch the shows.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, great live streams.
Michael Calore: Because they live stream all their, I’ve watched over 100 of those, and almost all of them were on Twitter, but the last 10 or so have been on Reddit.
Lauren Goode: Amazing.
Michael Calore: Yep. It is amazing.
Lauren Goode: We’ve come full circle.
Michael Calore: Technology.
Lauren Goode: And Reddit used to be right here in our office, for various reasons, corporate reasons. I have a really fond memory of the first time that something I tweeted went somewhat viral. And I don’t even know if it was viral by today’s standards, and Peter, this might’ve made it into the Land of the Giants episode. I’m not 100 percent certain, may have hit the cutting room floor. But in 2011, I was bored one weekend, I remember it was Labor Day weekend. I wasn’t really doing anything. I tweeted out a cartoon from the New Yorker, this really cute cartoon about some kid going back to school and saying, “Well, you’d know I did this summer if you followed me on Twitter.” And walked away from my computer, came back, noticed I had a ton of, I don’t even know if they were called app mentions or notifications or what they were called at the time, but all of a sudden I had a ton of activity. And I looked and The Fonz had retweeted me. Henry Winkler.
Michael Calore: Henry Winkler.
Lauren Goode: Like, “What?” I don’t know how he found it. I don’t know if maybe he was following me, maybe we were friends, I don’t know. And I was like, The Fonz retweeted me. It was a high, it was like, “Oh, this is how Twitter becomes addictive.” Because all of a sudden you’re connecting with these people, you’re a normie and you’re connecting with someone else who, even if you have a blue check mark, you’re a normie, and you’re connecting with someone else who has a blue check mark, but they are legitimately very established in their field and they have a huge follower base and an audience, and it’s this moment of connection. And then all of a sudden all these other people start responding to you and you feel like really plugged in that moment. And I remember that feeling and getting sort of hooked on it. And then the other thing I really have appreciated-
Peter Kafka: That’s a Gadget Lab exclusive, Lauren. That is not in the script.
Lauren Goode: Oh, it is? Oh, OK. So it did make the cutting room floor.
Kate Knibbs: If you’re listening to this now you’ve got special information you can only get in Gadget Lab.
Lauren Goode: My hugely insightful story didn’t make it on Land of the Giants, but it made it here, to the B-side. Another thing that I think our producer Boone will greatly appreciate, because he has written about this for WIRED, some great stories for WIRED about this, emergency Twitter. So Boone wrote a story about a guy on, was it New Zealand or Australia, Boone? The other side of the world.
Boone Ashworth [from afar]: New Zealand.
Lauren Goode: New Zealand, who was like a Twitter fire watcher. And he would pull in all these signals from around the internet and then tweet out where wildfires were happening. And that information would often cross our feeds, well in advance of when people needed to know about it. And then earthquake Twitter.
Michael Calore: Did you feel it?
Lauren Goode: We just had an earthquake the other night here in San Francisco. I was out to dinner, felt the whole restaurant shake, and my friends and I immediately pulled out our phones and then we looked at each other and we were like-
Peter Kafka: “What do we do?”
Lauren Goode: “What do we do? What do we do?” And I went on Threads and it just wasn’t the same. Was not the same.
Michael Calore: You need that fast, reverse chronological feed. You need that realtime reverse chron.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. But Adam Mosseri, now we should segue to the next part of the show, Adam Mosseri, who is running Threads for Instagram, he runs Instagram, this is part of Meta, has said that he wants to deprioritize news on Threads. It is not the platform for that, which is what some of us in the room here came to love Twitter for. Kate, Peter, what do you make of this? And are there any other social networks out there now that are filling that hole for you?
Kate Knibbs: I have basically given up on Threads because I think it’s boring. I think in part because it doesn’t prioritize news. I had hopes for Bluesky, but I gave up on it too. It’s like I got to pick one. Sometimes I copy and paste my tweets onto them and then I feel like a jerk doing it. I’m like, “Everyone’s going to know that I’m copy and pasting.” But I don’t want to have to come up with three distinct text-based micro-blogging personalities. So, no, nothing’s really filling the hole. I will say when there was the mass shooting in Maine recently, that was the first time a big news event happened and I found out via TikTok and not Twitter and I was like, “Oh, damn. We’re in a brave new world. I’m finding out about breaking news via TikTok at this point.”
Lauren Goode: Did you feel like you could trust that information?
Kate Knibbs: I mean, not really. You know how sometimes you’re scrolling on TikTok and a live blog will come up? It was someone live talking from a nearby town in Maine. No, and then I think I went to Google and put in Maine mass shooting. And, no, it wasn’t as good. But that’s how I found out. And I think that’s the first time I can remember finding out about breaking news on a different platform.
Peter Kafka: I had learned about a celebrity death on Threads recently. I can’t remember who it was.
Lauren Goode: Was it Matthew Perry?
Peter Kafka: Nope. It was prior to that. And the Lewiston Maine shootings I saw on Twitter. I don’t think it will ever replace that density of people who are tweeting about live stuff so we’ll never replicate that version of Twitter. I think Threads will be the closest to it simply because that seems to be where the most journalists are going to go by default. I do think that when Mosseri says he’s trying to deprioritize news, he is vague about what that means and it can mean a couple of different things. One is, “We’re not going to do the deals we used to do at Facebook slash Meta to work with news publishers. We’re not very interested in that. So let’s not tell you that we’re going to and then pull the rug out.” That makes sense. It seems like he also wants to avoid controversy, which I think is not going to work because if your Threads looks like my Threads, the stuff in the For You tab they’re giving me is just a range of people yelling at each other about Israel and Gaza.
So whether or not that’s news or not, that is still stuff that enrages and upsets people, and so if the premise was if we get rid of news, then Threads will be this cool chill place, that’s not going to work. But the episode, I keep talking about the episode we did, Lauren, but the thing that the episode that we built is a lot about how Twitter’s features were created basically on the fly, without a lot of thought about what’s good, what’s bad, what are after effects. And so I think the most interesting thing about Threads is what lessons has Mosseri taken from Twitter and other platforms. He could easily just rebuild Twitter that looks exactly like Twitter and he clearly wants to make something that is something like Twitter but also different. So I’m really fascinating to see what he leaves in and what he takes out.
Michael Calore: And it is a long game. It’s going to take several years before we see how any of these alternative platforms, let’s call them, evolve. There are a lot of them that are open and as soon as they start gaining traction, they might shut. There are some that are built to be open. So I’m a big Mastodon fan. I’ve been a Mastodon fan for a while. But it has big user experience problems. Onboarding is extremely difficult. Finding people to follow is extremely difficult. And I know I’m going to get a lot of hate toots about this, but it is-
Lauren Goode: They’re called toots.
Michael Calore: They’re called toots.
Lauren Goode: That’s part of the problem.
Michael Calore: That is also part of the problem, but it is like an objective fact that it is difficult to use and I don’t think you can argue that. And they have designers who are working on it so I do expect that at some point in the next year or so it’s going to be a lot easier to use Mastodon. But the whole idea of the fediverse and open data protocols between networks, we’re kind of back where we were about 15 years ago with all of the social networks saying that they’re going to be open and they’re going to play nice with each other. But I do think that that’s just sort of an armistice agreement that we have right now until one of them takes off.
Lauren Goode: Mastodon is so difficult to use that every time I go to use it in a web browser I literally don’t know what URL to type in. And then I started paying I think $1.99 per month to use Ivory on mobile. Which is a third party. It’s a client that takes you to Mastodon immediately because I can’t figure out how to get to it otherwise.
Michael Calore: Yeah. And this was a big deal in early Twitter. Twitter was this big coral reef. It had RSS feeds, it had open APIs, you could build things against it, and you could build a lot of really great client software. There’s a lot of people who opened up Twitter on their web browser and they were like, “I don’t know what this is.” And then you download a client and it helps you make sense of it. And now there aren’t really a lot of clients anymore.
Lauren Goode: No, not for Twitter.
Michael Calore: But for Mastodon there are. And I think that may be the thing that makes it? No, I really don’t think it’s ever going to be mainstream.
Lauren Goode: But what we’re talking about is a very fragmented experience too. So the things that we all loved about Twitter as news people, but also I think people in general finding their communities, is that you knew people would all be in the same place, whether they were birders or whether they were Phishheads or whether they were sports fans or whether they were annoying journalists. We all would be there. And when you’ve got six different instances of social apps on your phone, it’s really hard to find the thing you’re looking for.
At the same time, I mean this is still an area of technology for consumers where your life isn’t owned by just one company. It’s not like all Amazon Web Services and Google. Maybe one of these smaller players will rise from the ashes and take on Meta.
Michael Calore: Maybe it’ll be Twitter?
Lauren Goode: Question mark? I don’t know.
Michael Calore: For all we know it’s going to be Twitter. Sorry, X.
Kate Knibbs: I hope it is because I don’t want to start over from scratch. I gave up on Mastodon. I mean, are you guys going on Mastodon to talk about your niche interests and connect with specific communities?
Michael Calore: Yes.
Kate Knibbs: OK. Because I feel like I get that, but as a general source of information I gave up.
Peter Kafka: I’ve never figured out how to use Mastodon. And I’m a professional person who should try to use social platforms. But my premise is if it’s this difficult to get on, obviously it’s going nowhere. And if people lik Mike like it, great. And so now we’re just talking about bulletin boards. Wherever your nerd bulletin board is that you care about, you’ll go find a place to hang out there. And it doesn’t really matter what platform it’s on. It’s the people you want to connect with. So you’ll go there for that thing.
As Lauren said, the thing that Twitter was great about, it had everyone there, people you didn’t know, didn’t want to bump in into but would find anyway. I mean the thing I miss most right now is not news, it’s sports. It’s I’m watching a nationally televised game or even a not nationally televised game but one I’m really into and something crazy happened and I want to see how other people are reacting and maybe I want to throw up my own reaction. And that is gone. It’s not the end of the world. I could just sit alone by myself in my basement watching TV. But I liked it better when I could share or gloat or dunk on other people who were watching the same game.
Lauren Goode: Peter, I don’t want to end on that note of sad Peter sitting alone in his basement watching sports.
Peter Kafka: I’ve got other things going on. It’s OK, man.
Lauren Goode: Including our episode of Land of the Giants, episode two, of The Twitter Fantasy, which is coming out this week as well. Last shameless plug of this episode.
All right, well you heard it here. It sounds like the future of Twitter is BBS? Let’s take another quick break and when we come back we’ll do our recommendations.
[Break]
Lauren Goode: Kate Knibbs, I’m going to go to you first. What is your recommendation this week?
Kate Knibbs: I’m recommending a book to you. It’s called Do You Remember Being Born? It’s by a Canadian author named Sean Michaels and I got sent it because I’ve been covering AI and publishing a lot recently, so I think I got put on some list where I get sent any book that’s remotely involved with AI as a plot point. This one, Michael’s actually used, it’s about a poet who gets convinced by a fictional big tech company to come on and write a poem with an AI. And I was completely blown away by how much I loved this book. I was extremely skeptical that authors are going to find ways to incorporate AI into their writing that isn’t insanely cringey or hokey. And Michael’s managed to craft a beautiful book that I cannot recommend highly enough. I think now that he’s done it, no one else should bother. I’m not necessarily pro making this gimmick a thing, but somehow he managed to make an absolutely marvelous novel that incorporates AI generated text. And that is my recommendation.
Lauren Goode: Fascinating. What does the title refer to?
Kate Knibbs: It’s like part of the poem that this poet protagonist writes with their AI doppelganger.
Lauren Goode: And when did that come out?
Kate Knibbs: It came out in September.
Lauren Goode: Great.
Kate Knibbs: I think in the US and Canada. It’s available in the US as well as Canada. And honestly, I love it so much I might write about it at some point. I can’t believe how good it is considering how much side eye I generally give works that incorporate AI generated text.
Michael Calore: Well, if you’re going to write about it, you have to do it soon because this show’s going to come out and then other people are going to read it and scoop you.
Kate Knibbs: That’s OK.
Lauren Goode: OK. And the book is called Do You Remember Being Born? Thank you. That sounds like a great one. I’m going to have to pack that in my beach bag.
Peter, what’s your recommendation?
Peter Kafka: I was going to recommend a TV show, but I just feel so bad that Kate recommended a book, and I don’t really read, but I did read a novel a couple of years ago that’s great. It’s called Leave the World Behind. It’s about two Brooklyn yuppies who rent a house somewhere in Montauk or the North Shore, somewhere in Long Island. And then things go awry and it’s great and creepy. It’s by a guy named Rumaan Alam, and the reason you should go out and read it right now is because it’s going to be a Netflix movie with Julia Roberts in the next month or so. I’m really interested to see that. So you should go read it before it gets spoiled by the Netflix version, which might be great by the way.
Lauren Goode: Leave the World Behind, you said it’s called?
Peter Kafka: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: All right. But we are not all highbrow here. You can tell us about your TV show. Tell us.
Peter Kafka: OK.
Lauren Goode: Now I’m curious.
Peter Kafka: It’s not a new show. It’s been on since 2019. It is called What We Do In The Shadows.
Lauren Goode: Oh.
Peter Kafka: It’s on FX. It is a mockumentary about not particularly good at their job vampires who live in Staten Island. And it is so smart and so funny and so base but also really elevated. If this was on HBO, all the chattering class people would be loving it. For some reason, it is just not getting any, it’s getting enough love at FX that it’s now in its fifth season and it’ll do a sixth. But it’s great and you can definitely binge it and me and my 15-year-old nerd son watch it most nights and crack up.
Lauren Goode: And this also features the Flight of the Conchords singer, right? Am I remembering correctly?
Peter Kafka: It’s confusing. So there was a movie called the same title.
Lauren Goode: OK.
Peter Kafka: What We Do In The Shadows, that I think he was in, and he and Taika Waititi are both listed as producers of this, but I don’t think they’re involved in it.
Lauren Goode: Ah, OK. Oh, all right, so this is, I get it. This is a streaming series.
Peter Kafka: Ah Kate. Thank you, Kate. Kate just Slacked me the secret code because that is what me and my son say all the time.
Lauren Goode: Can we share that?
Kate Knibbs: It’s a really funny show.
Peter Kafka: Yeah. It’s a really funny show. There’s an episode where one of the vampires goes on the lam and ends up in Pennsylvania and renames himself Jackie Daytona and I can’t do it justice. You got to watch it. It’s great.
Lauren Goode: OK, great. Adding that to the list. Mike, what’s your recommendation?
Michael Calore: I’m going to recommend an old movie. It’s getting to be cozy season. It’s about to be dark stupid early. So it’s time to queue up some good movies. If you haven’t seen it, or if you haven’t seen it in 30 something years, I would recommend Pump Up The Volume. This is the 1990 feature starring Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis and it is a flashback to a time when terrestrial radio mattered, everybody had landlines. So it’s kind of like a peek into the past. However, the themes of the film, which are adults just do not understand their teenagers, and school is bad and boring, and freedom of speech is very important, and the old suits at the FCC just don’t know what’s good for America, those things still stand.
Peter Kafka: Also smoking is cool.
Michael Calore: Everybody in the movie smokes.
Peter Kafka: We just re-watched it too. It’s a hilarious time capsule.
Michael Calore: I feel like it was on streaming and then it disappeared for a bunch of years and now it’s back because I think you and one other person all just recently re-watched it. So when I was watching I was like, “Oh yeah, this is in my consciousness because people have been talking about it again.” But everybody smokes. I feel like there was product placement money by the tobacco companies to get all of the teenagers in this movie smoking.
Lauren Goode: It’s quite possible.
Michael Calore: So it was very strange. Anyway, awesome movie. It’s also very bad, but by which I mean it’s awesome. And a fantastic soundtrack, a life changing soundtrack. It came out when I was 15 and I remember buying the soundtrack. And all of that music is important to me now, so it must’ve had a big effect on me. Pump Up The Volume. Pump Up The Volume.
Lauren Goode: When Mike first came into the office this morning and said he was going to recommend Pump Up The Volume, I literally asked him if it was one of those 1990 CD services like Columbia House? Pump Up The Volume just sounds like one of those editions.
Peter Kafka: I’m surprised you didn’t see it, Lauren, because it was the introduction of Christian Slater as heartthrob and he’s doing a hilariously bad Jack Nicholson impression the whole way. But people of your age, I believe, fell in love with Christian Slater around that.
Lauren Goode: I definitely had a Christian Slater phase, but I haven’t seen Pump Up the Volume, so I’ll add that one to my watch list.
Michael Calore: You got to see it.
Lauren Goode: OK.
Michael Calore: You got to see it.
Lauren Goode: All right. And where did you stream this?
Michael Calore: On the internet.
Lauren Goode: OK.
Michael Calore: What’s your recommendation?
Lauren Goode: My recommendation is, I fibbed earlier when I said that it was my last time shamelessly promoting the podcast I did with Peter. My recommendation this week is Vox Media’s Land of the Giants. This season in particular is called The Twitter Fantasy. It is hosted by the one and only Peter Kafka, who joined us today for the show. But I joined him for the second episode of the series, which comes out this week. And it’s all about the culture of early Twitter and how the users made Twitter what it was, the good, the bad, the spammy. And how things got a little dark during this time too. I don’t know, did I do a good job describing that, Peter?
Peter Kafka: You got it all.
Lauren Goode: What’s your favorite part of the episode?
Peter Kafka: Well, this is a very inside joke. Has anyone here heard of a Cheetah Girl? Anyone? No.
Kate Knibbs: Aren’t they like a Disney Channel, yeah.
Peter Kafka: Thank you, Kate. We’ve had a long-running debate about whether we could refer to the Cheetah Girls without any other explanation in this.
Lauren Goode: There have been so many notes exchanged about, “Do we leave this in? Do we take this? Cheetah Girl? Former Disney Star Cheetah Girl?” I don’t even know what we landed on. I’m just going to whatever the producers decide. Yes.
Peter Kafka: I literally don’t know. We’re going to find out tomorrow.
Kate Knibbs: This is really embarrassing to admit that I know, but didn’t Rob Kardashian have a long-term relationship with a Cheetah Girl?
Lauren Goode: I just learned this yesterday because Peter Slacked me something and I was like, “OK, good to know. More context.” Yep, Rob Kardashian dated one.
Kate Knibbs: It’s kind of disturbing to me that that just sits in my brain. I’m like, “Oh yeah, of course. Adrienne the Cheetah Girl.
Lauren Goode: Peter, it seems that you have chosen the wrong co-host for this episode. Clearly you should have gone with Kate.
Peter Kafka: I just liked that we did a recommendations and we overlapped on with three of us, in terms of stuff we’ve been consuming recently.
Lauren Goode: That’s pretty good.
Peter Kafka: It was great.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. The mind meld-
Kate Knibbs: I’m going to watch your movie, Mike. I’m going to watch your movie.
Lauren Goode: Good. The mind meld, it’s happening. Despite the lack of Twitter, the mind meld is still happening. Peter, Kate, thank you so much for joining us on this week’s episode of Gadget Lab. It’s great to have you in the lab.
Peter Kafka: Thanks guys.
Kate Knibbs: Thank you.
Lauren Goode: Mike, thanks as always for being a great co-host.
Michael Calore: Thanks as always for being a great co-host.
Lauren Goode: And thanks to all of you for listening. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on Twitter.
Michael Calore: Toot at us.
Lauren Goode: Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads. Just check the show notes. Boone will link to us. By the way, our producer is the excellent Boone Ashworth. Goodbye for now and we’ll be back next week.
[Gadget Lab outro theme music plays]