What would happen if Twitter were to shut down over night? | Hacker News Reader

What would happen if Twitter were to shut down over night?

9 pointsm-localhost14 comments

Is that possible? What effect would that have on public opinion? Is Twitter/social media the Bayer, Degussa, IG Farben of our time (See also facebook in Myanmar)?

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the world would instantly become a better place, it isn't half as important as it likes to think it is

1. Loads of people and companies would set up Twitter clones/successors to try and cash in. Some of these would be federated/open source, some wouldn't, but either way, it's likely one or more would take off thanks to the Twitter refugees.

2. Existing Twitter alternatives would see a huge boost in popularity. Mastodon would get thousands of new signups in a matter of minutes/hours, and niche alternatives like Minds and Gab would probably see a fair bit of growth as well.

3. The media would panic as they realise the 'easy source of news' they've been relying on is gone and they don't know which replacement will take off yet.

4. Some 'lucky' alternative would end up attracting Donald Trump, and the popularity (from both fans and critics) would likely send the servers into meltdown. Given his political views, I can see Gab being the winner there.

5. The job market would see an increase in software engineers, designers, dev ops guys, etc if Twitter's workforce were also laid off/the company didn't exist anymore. It wouldn't be too noticeable (those fields are already super packed with candidates as is), but you'd see a small jump in numbers none the less.

6. Many, many news sites, blogs, wikis and forums would break horribly, since they used tweets as sources in articles and posts. Think the recent Photobucket catastrophe was bad? Well, the number of Twitter embeds likely dwarfs that by a thousandfold.

I think that sums it up.

Very good points. I haven't thought about the broken website problem due to embeds.

There would be replacements but they wouldn't have staying power. Twitter works because there's only one. Powerful people in the world can use it to monitor popular opinion on any topic. So its main role today in the lives of young people is political in nature. It allows them to come together and deliver a message to the establishment in a way that no other institution in society does. Think about the difference between Occupy Wall Street and #MeToo. People complain a lot about Twitter witch hunts, but that just shows you that Twitter movements actually get results. I can't think of a single goal from the Occupy movements that was met. The thing is that Twitter does not encourage dialogue or cooperation across subcultures of people. So likely, if Twitter were gone, each community would come up with its own replacement, and the powers that be would have no use for those.

I won't be able to invoke human intervention from otherwise ignorant service providers.

Twitter is my fastline to customer support.

I hate this about companies that use social support. Because its still in its infancy a lot of companies have marketing teams on their social media, someone complains to marketing - they skip the queue and call the desk line of one of the customer support managers.

Lots of annoying articles would be written about it, its stock price would tank and we'd forget about it in about 3 months.

Some opportunist guy whould create a clone very fast, demand creates supply.

This is similar to what happened in Malaysia when Uber closed down. The clone app got so much traffic it fell apart.

I don't think it's so easy to make people move to another platform that fast and to create the same/similar eco system that allows twitter right now, to influence public opinion (with popular hashtags build up by bot networks, or politicians tweeting)

Mastodon would skyrocket, although it wouldn't take on everybody. Facebook would probably profit too.

All the political parties in India would lack an avenue to vent against each other and also lose a wonderful avenue for mass-propaganda.

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