The long arc from Twitter to now

Neville Hobson 23 Mar 2026 3 min read

Twenty years ago, a new social network emerged that would go on to reshape how people communicate, connect, and engage online. On 21 March 2006, Jack Dorsey posted a simple message: “just setting up my twttr.”

It’s hard to imagine now just how unassuming that moment was. No sense of what would follow. No hint that this small experiment would become one of the defining communication platforms of a generation.

I joined Twitter in December 2006, just a few months later. In those early days, it felt less like a platform and more like a shared discovery. Conversations were open, informal, often serendipitous. You could connect with people across industries and geographies in ways that felt genuinely new. It wasn’t about reach or performance. It was about presence.

That early promise – of connection, of curiosity, of community – is what kept many of us there for so long.

But over time, the nature of the network changed.

As Twitter grew, it became something else. Algorithms began shaping what we saw. Metrics began shaping how people behaved. What had felt like a network gradually became a platform – optimised for attention, not conversation. The tone shifted too. Dialogue gave way, increasingly, to performance, outrage, and division.

For me, the inflection point came in 2023, when I decided to stop using Twitter, by then rebranded as X by Elon Musk, its new proprietor. It wasn’t a sudden decision, but the result of a growing misalignment between what the platform had become and how I wanted to engage online.

In more recent reflections, I’ve described X as a space where trust has eroded and where the overall environment feels more volatile and less constructive. That’s not to say there is no value there – far from it. But the balance has shifted in ways that make sustained, meaningful engagement harder.

At the same time, the broader social media landscape is undergoing another transformation – this time driven by artificial intelligence.

We are seeing more AI-generated content, more automated interaction, more signals that not everything in our feeds is human. The implications are still unfolding, but one thing is clear: social networks are becoming something different again. Less purely social. More complex, more mediated, and in some cases, less certain.

For those of us who have been part of this journey for two decades, that raises an important question – not just about platforms, but about our own choices.

I haven’t replaced Twitter with a single alternative. Like many, I’ve explored newer spaces – Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, and others – each with its own culture and possibilities. At the same time, I’ve found myself placing greater value on spaces I own, such as my own domain Studio6 website and newsletter. Places where the conversation feels more intentional, connected, and less shaped by external incentives.

In December this year, it will be twenty years since I first joined Twitter. That feels like a milestone worth noting – not as an ending, but as a marker of change.

Over these twenty years, my relationship with social networks has shifted – from curiosity, to routine, to something more considered.

Earlier this year, I wrote that I could no longer see an ethical case for staying on X. That wasn’t a rhetorical position. It was a reflection of how far the platform – and my own expectations of it – had diverged.

Social networks haven’t disappeared. But the way we use them, and the role they play in our professional and personal lives, is evolving.

Perhaps the real story isn’t what happened to Twitter. It’s how we choose to show up now – and, just as importantly, where we choose not to.

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