Twitter is in decline and less stable under Elon Musk, echoing LiveJournal and Tumblr falling apart under new ownership that didn't understand their communities
Gita Jackson / The Verge : Tweets: @chrismessina , @speedriver_ , and @delunaelizabeth . Thanks: @ants000 Tweets: Chris Messina / @chrismessina : “Twitter is in a period of decline. The site still functions, people are still using it, but there's a familiar stink that lingers on the website.” https://www.theverge.com/... Generally agree w @xoxogossipgita, and I'd point to Flickr as another example. #DeadTwitter @speedriver_ : @Techmeme @xoxogossipgita The arc of the internet is long but it tends to bend towards porn and hate Elizabeth de Luna / @delunaelizabeth : This article says “Twitter [is] different from Tumblr and LiveJournal” because it's not “a space mainly dominated with screamingly horny teenage girls” and while there's a lot to unpack in that statement, I'm mostly jealous of the author for avoiding stan Twitter for so long. https://twitter.com/... Thanks: @ants000
Context & Ripple Effects
Gita Jackson's essay lands mid-arc: Twitter under Elon Musk had already locked public tweet browsing behind a login wall, a stability signal the decline argument leans on, while the LiveJournal and Tumblr parallels give it a template — platforms that rotted after new owners misread the communities they'd bought.
The pattern was visible before the acquisition: back in 2018, writers were already floating Tumblr as an escape hatch for well-intentioned discussion, describing it as a popular site with the feel of a ghost town — evidence that ownership-driven community decay long predates Musk.
First-order effects
- Twitter's most engaged users begin hedging, mirroring the earlier exodus logic from Tumblr-era coverage, which directly erodes the conversation density that made the platform valuable to its remaining audience.
- Advertisers face a less stable venue: with Q2 2022 advertising revenue of $1.08 billion as the pre-Musk baseline, any perceived instability puts that revenue base at repricing risk.
Second-order effects
- Rivals get their opening on network effects: Meta's Threads launch later that summer was explicitly framed around whether Musk's self-inflicted wounds could make Twitter irrelevant, forcing competitors to court disaffected users rather than build from scratch.
- Platform-by-platform fragmentation accelerates across the social web — Reddit alienating users and Instagram shifting to entertainment in the same window — so no single successor absorbs Twitter's role cleanly.
Third-order effects
- If the LiveJournal/Tumblr pattern holds, the structural outcome is not one replacement but diffusion into niche communities — the Patreon-and-finstagram fragmentation already documented in 2018 — with X's measured US usage (27 million DAUs, down 18% year-on-year) tracking the decay rather than a cliff-edge collapse.
The trend: Social platforms are entering an era where ownership decisions, not technology, decide whether network-effect moats hold — and Twitter under Musk is the largest test case of whether a degraded community can be rebuilt or only slowly abandoned.