Clubhouse, TikTok are antidote to Twitter’s rage

After about a decade of stasis, big things are afoot in the world of social media. Audio chat app Clubhouse, newsletter platform Substack, and video-sharing app TikTok, among others, are giving rise to an explosion of new conversations and building large followings for the early adopters. But even more importantly, the new platforms are partially unbundling Twitter, threatening to make that platform less pivotal to the national discussion.
For about a decade, Twitter has been the place to go for news, public discussions and thinking on current affairs. Its radically open structure — you can just tweet directly to anyone on the platform at any time, and everyone can see it — and its encouragement of extreme virality mean that news and ideas fly faster and farther on Twitter than anywhere else. That allowed America to hear and see lots of things that the old media ecosystem wasn’t good at transmitting.
But that same virality and openness, along with the option of anonymity and the inherent lack of community moderation, created huge downsides to Twitter. A research team found in 2014 that rage travels faster than any other emotion on the platform. Harassment of women on the platform became so notorious that international human rights organizations took note. In 2018 three MIT scholars found that falsehoods travel faster on Twitter than real news. And as former President Donald Trump showed before he was permanently banned, Twitter can easily be leveraged by bad actors to stir up anger and hatred that turns to violence. All of this drove user engagement, which gave the company an incentive not to change things.
What’s really amazing is how long this unpleasant equilibrium endured. Now, finally, entrepreneurs have found ways to chip off pieces of the public discussion from that one central platform. And that promises to at least partially liberate the discourse from the downsides of that single platform.
Substack is one example, along with its competitors like Ghost. Blogging isn’t new, nor are newsletters, but by packaging both in an easy-to-use standardized format and facilitating subscriber payments, the new blogging platforms have managed to incentivize article-writing in a way that free services like Medium and Blogger didn’t. As a result, people are going back to blogging (disclosure: I write a Substack blog on the side). Article writing has distinct advantages over Twitter threads — it allows you to go on at length with less risk of boring people, makes it harder to selectively quote pieces of an idea out of context, and in general creates a much richer intellectual experience than slicing your thoughts into 280-character chunks.
TikTok, the video sharing app, might be another example. Though it competes more with YouTube than Twitter, it has become a place where young people can share their thoughts on politics and current affairs without fear of immediate attack.
—Bloomberg