Twitter Deathwatch

Founded in March 2006, Twitter – the largest blight of the modern web – has been in existence for just over 13 years. Over that time Twitter has moved from zero users to around a third of a billion monthly users. Over the same period the internet itself has grown from around 1.1 billion users to almost 4 billion, or around 50% of the world’s population.

This page exists to track Twitter’s peak, Twitter’s decline and, eventually, Twitter’s irrelevance – using the best metric possible; the percentage of internet users who use Twitter regularly – on either a daily or monthly basis.

Total world wide internet users taken from International Telecommunication Union’s 2018 estimates and can be found here. Twitter active user counts pulled from Twitter’s own quarterly reports.

The good news is that we appear to have passed Twitter’s peak monthly use as a percentage of world wide internet users. The bad news is that daily percentage use continues to creep upwards though, luckily, by only a small amount each year, something that could rapidly change.

2020 may be a crucial year for those of us looking forwards to Twitter’s eventual irrelevance; the 2016 US Presidential Election was a brutal assault on the public’s attitude towards social media and the 2020 election looks to be heading in the same direction. An inherently hostile platform full of drive-by sniping, brutal personal attacks, and the risk of life-altering doxing will drive casual users away – the same casual users that must be converted into the daily posters so that a site like Twitter can maintain it’s public mindshare and so achive long term viability.

Twitter’s user culture is rotten and, as that rot worms it’s way deeper and deeper into the site, Twitter’s slow match towards irrelevance will be hard to stop.