自从埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）向Twitter员工发出最后通牒，要求他们“走极端”或起飞，周四晚上该网站的剩余劳动力明显减少，Twitter TWTR 0.0%一直在为自己主持一场持续的觉醒。长期以来，喜欢（或不喜欢）与该平台的爱恨情仇的用户一直在240个字符的突发中表现出悲伤的阶段。

  超级用户普遍认为Twitter可能是一个地狱网站，但它是我们的地狱网站。它看似不可避免的崩溃将给各地的信息瘾君子的生活留下一个大洞。

  这一切可能都是真的，但这甚至不是更大故事的一小部分。推特的批评者很快指出，它只是社交媒体生态系统中相对较小的一部分，与TikTok、Meta的Facebook和Instagram以及Alphabet的YouTube等以内容为导向的巨大竞争对手相比相形见绌。

  然而，推特从来没有关注过内容的深度。相反，它提供了跨信息空间的即时性和同时性。把它想象成一只苍蝇的广角、多角度的眼睛，经过优化，可以发现周围的运动，并做出即时反应。

 上周，ComScore首席营销官Tania Yuki解释了这是如何让品牌和Twitter的商业客户能够即时发现并参与到正在发生的对话中，从而能够与客户就当前相关的问题进行真正的交流。这种动态是Twitter商业价值主张的核心。

  它只适用于品牌，因为它适用于其他一切。一些用户来Twitter聊天，但更多的用户来了解人们在谈论什么。该平台对于各种社区来说变得不可或缺，这些社区需要对一种仅来自个人印象拼凑的情况进行战略观察，并且需要理解自然灾害、政治动荡、经济趋势等复杂而快速的情况。

  一旦平台达到规模，它就成为进入全球潜意识的独特窗口。从后端流出的数据流对于映射无形社区、内容消费、影响模式和参与模式之间的复杂关系来说是独一无二的，也是非常宝贵的。

  那些知道如何处理这些数据的人可以使用它来实现重要的业务目标。你对受众的了解越多，你就可以制作出更具相关性和针对性的内容，从而使那些人更有可能采取你想要鼓励的任何行动。

  有时人们甚至不需要访问高级数据和分析来了解如何利用这一点。Twitter奖励了个人用户对如何沟通和参与的天生理解，同时让他们能够快速、低成本地进入全球舞台。其中一位用户最终当了一段时间的美国总统。另一个发了一大笔钱，买了推特，然后像一个4岁的孩子在圣诞节早上用玩具一样把它砸了。

  但其他人为自己和他们的想法搭建了平台，而这些平台是他们无法通过任何其他媒介实现的。每一个使用Twitter传播活动新闻的出版商、艺术家、电影制作人或任何类型的创作者都会非常怀念它，如果平台倒闭，他们的影响力和收入可能会立即大幅下降。

  推特的力量伴随着滥用，包括以无人机袭击的速度和突然性破坏陌生人的生活，煽动恐惧，动员基于半生不熟的想法、巧妙的模因和赋权幻觉的不稳定群众运动。如果推特宕机，这些部分将不会错过。

  成功的平台可能能够复制或超越Twitter的功能，但它们在很长一段时间内（如果有的话）都无法接近Twitter的真正价值。Twitter并不是关于任何一组单独的对话或关系，这些对话或关系对它最忠实的用户来说可能是如此重要。这是所有这些谈话的总和，所有时间，所有地点，所有时间。

  我们可以搬到Mastodon或Discord服务器或其他地方来维护我们的个人和专业网络。然而，在设计上，这些仍然是村庄和封闭社区。我们可以享受邻里的好处，但我们会错过大城市的便利——最重要的是，我们能够从高处俯瞰窗外，在一个单一的视野中目睹所有混乱、热闹、活力和活动的全貌。

来源：富比士

链接：https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2022/11/18/what-well-lose-when-we-lose-twitter/?sh=308862b4c5cf

编辑：吴漫

原文：

What We’ll Lose When We Lose Twitter

Elon Musk laughs while Twitter burns, editorial illustration by Rob Salkowitz.

Since Elon Musk’s ultimatum to Twitter employees to “go extreme hardcore” or take off ended with an apparent decimation of the site’s remaining workforce on Thursday night, TwitterTWTR 0.0% has been hosting an ongoing wake for itself. Longtime users who have enjoyed (or not) a love-hate relationship with the platform have been acting out the stages of grief in 240-character bursts.

The prevailing sentiment among power users is that Twitter may have been a hellsite, but it was our hellsite. Its seemingly-inevitable collapse is going to leave a big hole in the lives of information junkies everywhere.

That all may be true, but it’s not even a fraction of the larger story. Twitter’s detractors are quick to point out that it is a relatively small part of the social media ecosystem, dwarfed by titanic content-oriented competitors like TikTok, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram and Alphabet’s YouTube.

However, Twitter has never been about depth of content. Instead, it provides immediacy and simultaneity across information space. Think of it like a fly’s wide-angle, multifaceted eyes, optimized to spot motion at the periphery and enable instant reaction.

Last week, ComScore CMO Tania Yuki explained how that allowed brands and Twitter’s commercial customers to instantly spot and jump in to emerging conversations as they were happening, so they could engage authentically with their customers around issues relevant in the moment. That dynamic is at the center of Twitter’s business value proposition.

It only works that way for brands because it works that way for everything else. Some users come to Twitter to talk, but many more come to find out what people are talking about. The platform became indispensable for all kinds of communities that required the kind of strategic view of a situation that only comes from a patchwork of individual impressions—and for making sense of complex and fast-moving situations like natural disasters, political upheavals, economic trends and more.

Once the platform got to scale, it became a unique window into the global subconscious. The data stream that came out the back end was unique and invaluable for mapping complicated relationships between invisible communities, content consumption, patterns of influence, and modes of engagement.

Those who knew what to do with that data could use it to achieve important business objectives. The more you know about an audience, the more relevant and targeted you can make your own content—making it more likely those people will take whatever actions you are trying to encourage.

Sometimes people didn’t even need access to advanced data and analytics to understand how to take advantage of this. Twitter rewarded individual users with an innate understanding of how to communicate and engage whilst giving them instant, low-cost access to a global stage. One of those users ended up being the President of the United States for a while. Another built a fortune big enough to buy Twitter, then break it like a 4 year-old with a toy on Christmas morning.

But others built platforms for themselves and their ideas that they could not have reached through any other medium. Every publisher, artist, filmmaker, or creator of any kind who used Twitter to disseminate news about their activities will miss it badly and likely experience a huge, immediate drop in reach and income if the platform goes down.

Twitter’s power came with abuses, including the ability to wreck the lives of strangers with the speed and suddenness of a drone strike, to gin up fear, and to mobilize destabilizing mass movements rooted in half-baked ideas, clever memes and the illusion of empowerment. If Twitter goes down, those parts of it will not be missed.

Successor platforms might be able to replicate or surpass Twitter’s functionality, but they will not come close to matching its true value for a long, long time, if ever. Twitter was not about any individual set of conversations or relationships, as important as those may have been to its most dedicated users. It was about the sum total of all those conversations happening everywhere, all the time, all at once.

We can move to Mastodon or onto Discord servers or other places to maintain our personal and professional networks. However, by design, these remain villages and gated communities. We can enjoy the benefits of the neighborhood, but we will miss the conveniences of the big city – most of all, the ability to look out a window from commanding heights and witness the totality of all the chaos, bustle, dynamism and activity in a single view.