Twitter can be divided into two epochs, or Twepochs. "Good Twitter" and "Bad Twitter." We are ~2.5 years into Bad Twitter.
You probably can't put your finger on it either, but something about Twitter lately just feels..... I dunno.... Bad? Uninspired? Lethargic? Miasmic? What felt like this amazing, fresh, exciting thing just a few years ago now seems like the patch of dead and yellow grass next to the high school football bleachers where people keep peeing.
The jokes feel stale. The real-time news just feels like an overwhelming deluge that we've realized we can actually pull ourselves away from. The witty insights just feel like shouting matches from the same voices. We made this monster, and now we have to deal with it. Twitter is like our own We Need To Talk About Kevin.
But when exactly was the change from Good Twitter to Bad Twitter? Writer Adrian Chen suggests this change happened sometime around summer 2012, a time when a fresh bumper crop of election memes were blossoming and the chuckles flowed like wine.
Honestly, I don't know. I have some ideas, but part of acknowledging Bad Twitter's existence is to accept that sometimes one must hold her hot take inside her, guarded like a precious secret. In Good Twitter times, my two cents about the state of Twitter may have been welcomed. No longer.
That's why the only thing left is to take a poll.