If Twitter Dies, Where Do the Fan Communities Go?

The post If Twitter Dies, Where Do the Fan Communities Go? appeared first on Consequence.

People who have been on Twitter long enough have learned a unique language — the inside jokes and memes of the chronically online. “You’re telling me a shrimp fried this rice?” Do the words “bean dad” or “30 – 50 feral hogs” ring any bells? Can you or can you not survive scrolling for five minutes through the replies of a PopCrave post?

Social media has shifted from its exciting beginnings and Twitter is no exception. What was initially pitched as a fun micro-blogging platform became one of the most timely digital forums; now, following what appears to be a soft launch of a rebrand to “X” that began over the weekend, it looks like Twitter is moving into its next stage, perhaps without the bird logo.

Over the years, Twitter became the place for breaking news, the best awards show reactions, and something of a replacement for water cooler talk. It was where a television show could generate word-of-mouth buzz and become a sleeper hit, and comedians and creatives could generate a following in a new, more individualized way. It was here that fandom took on a new form, too — MySpace was dead, and people could connect over a mutual love for an artist or act by keeping tabs on a hashtag and sliding into the DMs of another impassioned poster.

Consider the idea of “updates accounts,” where fans of artists like Harry Styles or Taylor Swift can keep listeners in the loop on anything from album release numbers to studio collaborator buzz. “Fan cam” creators pioneered the idea of pulling in potential new fans by highlighting their favorite act’s best moments onstage, with some racking up millions of views throughout the years.

Then, there’s the BTS ARMY, the largest and most organized fandom on the app — and in many parts of the internet at large. In the heyday of Twitter, the artists of BTS were especially active on the site, posting through a relaxed, unfiltered lens that initially set them apart from many of their peers. Fans responded in turn, and the platform quickly became a place where people knew they could find everything related to the band. ARMY used every feature of Twitter to the fullest; whether sending out a happy hello to a member, trending a hashtag to show support for news or a fresh project, or interacting to vote in awards shows, ARMY became known as the definitive force in fandom.

With an act that originated out of South Korea, there was another piece to the puzzle — global fans didn’t always receive subtitles for content, and tweets and livestreams from the members are almost always, understandably, in their native language of Korean. Many Twitter users knew they could come to the platform for real-time translations from dedicated, bilingual posters, or jump in the replies of an update from a member to quickly find the most accurate interpretation of a South Korean figure of speech. There are hundreds of accounts dedicated to posting translations in real time, and others that translate news articles written in English back into Korean, or into Japanese, French, Spanish, and so many more languages for fans living around the globe.

A spokesperson for one of the largest BTS translations accounts, which operates on both Twitter and YouTube, tells Consequence: “Twitter really helps us show our work more easily… It also feels like we can connect to our followers more directly. Unlike YouTube comments, ARMY can quote our work or tag us when they use our translations in their own projects, like ‘on this day’ BTS history accounts, art, edits, and lyric analysis.” The accounts for BTS Translations, which are run by a team of over a dozen translators and video subtitle writers, have amassed followings of over 1.5 million people on both Twitter and YouTube, each.

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, the site has been plagued with plenty of problems. The dust has started to settle from the fiasco that resulted from the messy launch of Twitter Blue, the paid version of an app that has otherwise been free since its inception. But on July 3rd, another roadblock for longtime users emerged: All unverified accounts received a notification that they had exceeded a rate limit, and were unable to view tweets on their timeline or by searching. Seeming to be the result of contract renewal with Google Cloud, the temporary rate limit has since been lifted — but a dark cloud hovers over those who depend on the app as the primary way to connect with other fans.

While the BTS Translations folks acknowledge that blogging site Tumblr has its merits (and its own subset of dedicated, engaged followers), a platform like TikTok doesn’t make as much sense for text-based translations. “If we were to lose Twitter — our account, or the website entirely — we would be losing a place to show our content to followers so quickly,” they explain. “Many ARMY are only on Twitter, and not in other places like Tumblr, so we would be losing an area to connect and support them with translations when they need it… If Twitter disappears completely, gathering information in one place like that would be much harder.”

For anyone who remembers the fall of MySpace, the stakes felt different. By the time that social networking site shut down in 2009, there were 360 million users on Facebook. Better, sharper, more interesting and more reliable options had popped up; MySpace was killed by the competition. Tumblr, on the other hand, had long been an enclave for creatives and enthusiasts of more niche parts of fandom — think fan fiction, art, character theories, and the kind of community that can spawn from hyper-specific shared interests. The platform was purchased by Yahoo in 2013, which proved to be a bad match, and Tumblr in its most beloved form suffered something of a slow death as more and more users dropped off.

For all its flaws, Twitter functioned as something of a virtual town hall, and it’s a place people can still consider a timely source of information. It’s not being killed by the competition, or the fact that people are flocking to a newer, brighter, or cooler option. It’s collapsing bit by bit through bad internal decisions, in a way that feels closer to Tumblr’s demise than that of Myspace — but this time, there’s not a  great alternative.

The week I was working on this piece, in an effort to gain insight from various fandoms, I sent out DMs to large Twitter accounts who operate in the space. My efforts happened to coincide with the latest effort to get people to convert to Twitter Blue: I was hit with a notification that if I wished to DM someone who didn’t follow me, I now needed to subscribe to the paid version of the app. My many messages seem to have gone undelivered entirely; it was kind of a perfect microcosm of the slow de-evolution of the app we’ve all been walking through since last fall.

So the question persists — if Twitter someday goes under completely, where will these fan communities go? The answer is that no one seems to know for sure, and most people are holding on for dear life through each bummer of an update that unverified users receive. Threads is off to a shaky start, but the consensus is that it may not be a viable replacement for Twitter. TikTok remains staggeringly powerful, but is limiting in its core function as a video-based app.

“If Twitter were to really shut down, deciding which platform to use instead would be a big decision for us,” says the representative for BTS Translations. “This decision would partly be based on what would work best for us in terms of the kind of content we post, but it would also in large part be based on where other members of the fandom go. This demographic of ARMY would need a new ‘home’ on the internet — and we would just be part of the big move.”

If Twitter Dies, Where Do the Fan Communities Go?
Mary Siroky

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