X still marks the spot
Turns Out No One Can Compete With Elon Musk's Twitter
When Elon Musk took over two years ago, Twitter was pronounced dead. Many challengers assembled. Here's what they learned.
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The Lede
About three weeks after Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, #RIPTwitter started trending. As the bird app's outlook grew more bleak, several alternative conversation platforms hatched: Narwhal, Spoutible, Spill, Post, and Cohost among them. In July 2023, Meta tried to seize the moment by launching Threads. But two years after Musk took over, the platform is still the room where it happens.
Key Details
- Most of Twitters' upstart challengers have folded. BI talked to several founders about what they learned trying to compete with Musk, and the state of civil discussion online.
- A legacy platform like X or a large one like TikTok, have their advantages, and might become a crowded center for discussion, but users are left to the whims of its CEO.
- Some places where Twitter's former users went are still growing. Spill, a Black-owned social platform, has been downloaded more than half a million times.
