Necessary evils: Twitter & printers

Twitter is in a really strange place right now. It's important and totally irrelevant all at the same time. Kind of like my printer.

I hate my printer. I can't even say that I have a love/hate relationship with it - I hate it. It's as temperamental as Axl Rose - it only prints when it wants and only from specific devices. The settings are a ballache to access. The ink lasts about five minutes and is ridiculously expensive. Plus, you have to buy the official branded ink, or it won't work (as I know from painful experience).

In 2010, I swore I'd never buy another printer as my old HP bit the dust. I work in an office; it has perfectly adequate printers (and 10% more reliable than mine). But then, of course, lockdown happened, and I worked from home for 18 months. Suddenly, the need for a printer arose again, and I broke my promise.

It's not like a printer is essential - there are only a few things I absolutely *need* to print - forms that need physical signatures or documents that require filling out by hand. I also love to scribble on a physical copy of a brief; is it even a pitch if you don't finish the process with a battered, heavily tattooed copy of the brief?

Having a printer is more like a necessary evil - I know it's a pain in the ass and a waste of resources, yet I persist.

I feel like Twitter now exists in this space: Twitter is now the home printer of the social and digital landscape.

Using Twitter is a painful experience; most people avoid it if they can. But like a home printer, they hold onto those moments when it becomes invaluable. We had one in the UK a couple of weeks ago, as everyone flocked to Twitter to collectively keep up with the 'will he/won't he' Boris saga. But for the most part, steering clear of it is the best bet.

Hell, even Twitter's users call it a hellsite.

It's a long way from the public town hall that Elon Musk is trying to back out of buying. So why does it persist? Why, like my home printer, can't we consign it to the great tech graveyard in the sky?

To stretch my printer metaphor to its breaking point, while the actual printing is painful, the outputs can still be highly entertaining/helpful/informative. Tweets removed from the great Twitter game take significant prominence in many different contexts.

Where would your favourite Instagram meme account be without a whole bunch of screenshotted tweets to use every day? Journalists including "how Twitter reacted" in their articles may not be in touch with the nation's mood. Still, they showcase Twiter users' ability to create hilarious hot takes on various issues.

The fact that the media represents such a vast swathe of the 25% of Twitter users who actually tweet plays an enormous part in the persistence of Twitter. Since they rely on it both for identifying stories and padding out existing pieces, journalists have much more to lose from Twitter's demise than any other portion of its user base.

But if you're a brand or a business, do you want to be on this strange, clunky, malfunctioning platform? That's the question. And based on Twitter's most recent results, it seems like some advertisers are starting to walk away - revenue was down 1% YoY. Declining ad revenue isn't limited solely to Twitter, so there's no proof that brands dislike what they see. But the narrative around the platform - a dysfunctional hellsite that its most famous user tried to buy then "changed his mind" - doesn't exactly scream "home of advertising". 

Don't get me wrong - I'm sure some people love the daily Twitter drama, and someone somewhere must like the Twitter.com newsfeed layout; otherwise, they'd have changed it ages ago. And I'm sure some people love their home printer and the regular drama it brings into their lives - it needs ink! Needs paper! Needs calibrating! It needs something vague and ill-defined! But neither drama is for me. I prefer to experience the drama at a distance as much as possible - tweets in other contexts and a heavily modded Tweetdeck setup suit me fine. And now I'm back in the office more regularly, my home printer can pretty much do one...