In the last 12 months, massive Twitter (now X) and Reddit changes have revealed just how fragile our largest online communities really are. These platforms, commonly referred to as digital “town squares,” are in reality governed by a small group of powerful individuals or companies. Because when they suddenly make decisions like this, they can send millions of users scrambling and raise broader questions about who really owns the places where we communicate.
Twitter was purchased in 2023 by Elon Musk, and the company was rebranded as X. Musk implemented massive changes: He fired thousands of employees, completely revamped verification, altered content moderation, and increased the visibility of paid users. These shifts caused the number of daily active users to plummet about 30% by the end of 2023, The Verge reported. Many longtime users and especially journalists, activists and researchers all stopped using the platform, or scaled back. Many migrated to Mastodon or Bluesky, looking for platforms with less chaos and more openness.
Reddit faced its own backlash in mid-2023 when it began charging high fees for API access. This move effectively shut down many third-party Reddit apps and accessibility tools. Moderators who do unpaid labor to manage Reddit communities protested by making major subreddits private or read-only. Reddit refused to back down, prioritizing its IPO plans over community concerns.
The reason these kinds of things happen is due to the centralization: Centralized platforms provide both incredible scale and incredible convenience, but by doing so they make this sort of thing possible, and often easy. A single person can rewrite the rules of the game overnight, locking people out of their communities, and prizing profit over people. Although they profit from our content, our labor, our loyalty, we have materially no control over how these platforms are run.
That’s why an increasing number of people are seeking out decentralized options. Mastodon, for instance, allows users to sign on with independently operated communities that all link to one another through a common protocol. No one person owns it. Likewise, Bluesky, which was initially funded by Twitter, is based around a protocol allowing people to bring their content and followers with them from one platform to another. Central to this notion of portability is user ownership: people can take their content and relationships with them so they’re not waiting for the hammer to drop when a platform goes up in flames.
Some experts have said government intervention is necessary. One possibility is to demand that platforms offer data portability, so that users can take their communities with them to another place. The European Union has already started to more tightly regulate big-tech platforms, through the Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires transparency and risk assessments. But here in the United States, we’re still relying mostly on corporate beneficence, a roll of the dice.
For myself, as of lately I’ve begun to split my time online. I continue to use Reddit, but with more caution. I have never considered using Mastodon and looking at closed community spaces, like Discord, but perhaps I might. These platforms may not be as appealing, but they feel more thoughtful and safer from sudden upheaval. I’ve begun to be more conscious about what I post and where. If a platform doesn’t treat its users with respect, I don’t want to use it to give it my content or my attention.
Ultimately, we as a society need to re-examine our relationship with online platforms. Politics should not be a sport for billionaires and multinational corporations. What we need are digital spaces that put community first, that offer transparency and accountability. Until then, the question of “who owns what we say to each other?”. remains unanswered.
And we should all be concerned about that.
Sources:
https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-x-declining-user-base-2025
https://thedailycougar.com/2024/08/05/elon-musks-twitter-takeover-has-been-disastrous-for-the-site/
https://freedomhouse.org/article/eu-digital-services-act-win-transparency
https://www.infegy.com/insight-brief/api-ocalypse-now
Leave a Reply