In fact, surveys show that as many as one third of America wouldn’t care (or even notice, for that matter), if Twitter was no more. Which, unfortunately, may very well be in the flailing social media’s near future. I’ve recently written about Twitter’s attempts at redemption – some laughable, some that actually made sense, and the general consensus was that it might have a fighting chance after all. But these latest results cast a dark blanket of doubt as to Twitter’s future success – and indeed seem to show that it doesn’t have much of a chance to rise back to its former glory.
According to The Verge, the above-mentioned survey found that 9.6 percent of Americans greatly dislike Twitter (never mind ambivalence, or just not caring) and that only 19.3 percent of those surveyed greatly like it. If we compare this to Twitter’s competition, we find that 9.3 percent of Americans greatly dislike Facebook, but that a whopping 41.3 percent said they greatly like it. Twitter was found to be the platform that was the least likely to be recommended out of all the others, namely Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. Again from The Verge, “The survey, conducted from September 28th to October 10th, included 1,520 people nationally representative of the US, based on 2016 US Census estimates.”
The survey did not go so far as to ask participants to offer more information as to what prompted them to answer the way they did, so it’s hard to pinpoint just what it is that Twitter is doing that is causing America to stop caring about its platform. It unfortunately comes right on the heels of years of struggling for Twitter, its failed attempts at growing its user base, the financial issues that followed, the amount of bullying and harassement from its users that it struggled to control and that whole Russian using it to toy with the 2016 US election business, to name a few.
All in all, the future doesn’t look too promising for Twitter, despite its best efforts to stay afloat. It seems like I’m usually ending my Twitter posts with words of doom just like these, and unfortunately Twitter doesn’t seem to be making enough (or the right) effort to make me believe this will change anytime soon.