With the news of Twitter’s acquisition by Elon Musk and the potential changes happening to the platform, it seemed appropriate to take this opportunity to talk about the current state of healthcare social media and what the future might hold.
Twitter Community Legacy
For the past 9 years Twitter has been the main channel through which the HCLDR Community has connected. When we started, there were many other communities on Twitter like #hcsm and #hcsmca. Over the past few years we have seen many of those communities end their run on Twitter. They are all missed, but the connections that those communities created endure to this day.
Some of those connections spawned new communities on Twitter. Others kept the relationship going on LinkedIn, Facebook, or directly one-on-one. To me that is the true legacy of these communities – the friendships and relationships they created that would not have been possible otherwise.
Fear, Worry, but Reserving Judgement
With Elon Musk’s announcement there is a lot of fear about the future of Twitter. There is already talk about how it will become an even bigger cesspool where all sorts of voices will be allowed to spew whatever unfounded vitriol they want.
I’m worried, but honestly, the cat is already out of the bag in my mind. There are plenty of ways for people to get their messages out there – and not just on Twitter. There are all sorts of podcasts that people can subscribe to, there are websites that you can visit, even in-person meetings that you can attend.
What Twitter and other social media platforms are lacking is the inability to choose which voices you want to listen to and which you don’t. I can choose which podcast to listen to, I can choose to watch a YouTube video…but there is no way to prevent someone from trolling/spamming a hashtag that I find valuable on Twitter. There is no way to block that many accounts, especially when its so easy to create fake new ones.
If they fix that, as Musk has promised, Twitter may end up being better than before. At the same time, promises are easy to make, harder to keep.
Regardless, I’m going to try and reserve judgement until we see what will or won’t be changing. I’m still planning to post and to use Twitter as I always have…until the day I’m either talking to just myself or until I feel that the value is no longer worth the effort.
Beyond Twitter
When that day comes, I wonder what I would migrate to?
LinkedIn has become a great place for news and education. I never really got fully into Facebook. Snapchat seems to have disappeared from the conversation. TikTok seems fun but I haven’t seen a ton of interaction there. Instagram is interesting, but I still haven’t figured it out fully.
I’m curious to hear from the HCLDR community about what life beyond Twitter might look like. Would there be other place to gather virtually like VR (as Chuck Webster has long been an advocate for), or other platforms?
Join the #hcldr tweetchat on Tuesday April 26th at 8:30pm ET (for your local time click here) when we will be discussing:
- T1 Have we reached peak social media? Are we just on the slow decline at this point and there aren’t any more new people joining?
- T2 If not here on Twitter, where else could communities like HCLDR continue to thrive?
- T3 Are you concerned about the future of Twitter given the recent news?
- T4 If you had $44B to spend on Twitter, how would you change it/improve it?
Image Credit
Photo by Brett Jordan: https://www.pexels.com/photo/red-blue-and-yellow-textile-5417837/
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