Where will we talk about sports in 2023?

Twitter is imploding, but so far its would-be challengers are coming up short.

image generated by DALL-E: “pencil drawing of a person looking at an iphone and being very confused”

Twitter was how I found the people who inspired me to start writing. Twitter was where I received encouragement to keep writing, even when I was doing it mostly for free. Twitter was how I made the serendipitous connections that led to my first full-time writing job. When I started this newsletter, my first subscribers came from Twitter.

In short, without Twitter, I wouldn’t be writing this, and you wouldn’t be reading it.

So it’s with great solemnity that I ask this question: where will we talk about the Gamecocks in 2023? Because, for the first time in 14 years, I’m not sure that it will be on Twitter.

That’s partly because Twitter has, in the past year, become a worse and worse site to use; as a result, there are fewer and fewer people using it. And, as if unsatisfied by how quickly people are fleeing the site, last week Elon Musk imposed a cap on how much you’re able to use it. Viewing 600 posts per day might seem like a lot — and to a normal person on a normal day, it probably is. But it’s hard to imagine that getting you through a single college football game, much less an entire Saturday of college football games.

As Sean Keeley wrote for Awful Announcing, Elon Musk may have effectively killed sports Twitter.

The other reason I’m not sure Twitter is where we’ll be hanging out during football games is the sheer volume of alternatives. There is Mastodon, Post, Threads, Notes, BlueSky, and probably at least three more that launched since you started reading this sentence.

With so many alternatives, you might think I’d be able to come out and say we definitely won’t be using Twitter this fall. But I can’t say that right now, and at this point I’m not sure I ever will.

The big problem with each of these Twitter clones is that they’re not very good! Each of them has potential, in their own way. But none of them seems interested in or capable of delivering what people miss about the Twitter of yore.

Take Threads, the text-based Instagram spinoff Meta debuted last week. I had high hopes for this product, as Meta is obviously an extremely rich company with a vested interest in striking a blow to one of its biggest competitors. And according to Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, Meta felt a real sense of urgency to get Threads out the door as soon as possible, even if it meant the app not being available in the European Union at launch.

But after using Threads for a week, all I can think was If this was all you had, why were you in such a hurry to get it out the door?

On Threads, you can follow people, but you can’t actually see the Threads from people you follow — at least not without great difficulty. Instead, your timeline is filled with algorithmically generated content from, like, Home Depot and other brands posting disposable nonsense like “our lumber department is bae 😍”.

As Ryan Broderick put it in Garbage Day:

My verdict: Threads sucks shit. It has no purpose. It is for no one. It launched as a content graveyard and will assuredly only become more of one over time … It feels like a 90s-themed office party organized by a human resources department. And my theory, after staring into its dark heart for several days, is that it was never meant to “beat” Twitter — regardless of what Zuckerberg has been tweeting. Threads’ true purpose was to act as a fresh coat of paint for Instagram’s code in the hopes it might make the network relevant again. And Threads is also proof that Meta, even after all these years, still has no other ambition aside from scale.

Part of the reason Meta has been able to claim astronomical signup figures is that your Instagram follows and followers automatically port right in. If you have an Instagram account, you have a Threads account, whether you’ve asked for one or not. It’s like the day in 2014 when everyone with iTunes account woke up to find in their library a new U2 album they hadn’t asked for.

So it’s no surprise, then, that most of the praise for Threads has come from people who already had massive Instagram followings. These multinational corporations and fitness influencers and meme aggregators are logging into Threads and immediately experiencing a ton of engagement with the people who were automatically following their account.

But I fail to see the use-case for the average person. The person who isn’t looking at their Threads account and wondering how it fits into a business plan. Someone who just wants to log on and have a good time, or keep up with the news, or talk about the game.

And that’s the ultimate failing of every other app I’ve sampled during this interregnum. There’s no reason to keep coming back unless you’re leveraging the platform for brand awareness or signups.

I’m still holding out hope for BlueSky. Jack Dorsey may be a conspiracy theorist and crypto-cultist, but for the majority of his 15 years at Twitter, it was a pretty good site! Furthermore, the chill, pro-user ethic he’s bringing to BlueSky makes it an obvious refuge for those turned off by Elon’s capricious, dictatorial management of Twitter. And the invite-only beta, though personally vexing to me, is building up the kind of hype that could eventually lead to a big influx of new signups when it finally does fully launch.

So … where are you planning to hang out during games this year? (Of course, as I’ve written about previously, eschewing the internet entirely is a pretty good option as well.)

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A quick personal note before we get to a couple other college sports items.

I’ve felt really grateful for your reading and providing kind feedback on the story I wrote about my dog. I’m always self-conscious about injecting myself and my family into the newsletter any more than is absolutely necessary, but it helped me tremendously to express my grief and have others bear witness to it. So, thank you.

Also, if anyone would like an update on how the star of the story, Hugo, is doing, he’s started introducing himself to strangers like this: “Hi, my name is Hugo. I used to have two dogs, but one of them died.”

More drama at The Athletic

“The New York Times sports department sent a pointed letter to the newspaper’s leadership Sunday asking for answers about the future of the section amid concern that it could be shut down in an ongoing effort to further integrate the Athletic into the Times.”

Ben Strauss, Washington Post

Air Force hockey puts The Proclaimers to shame

Matt Brown of the excellent Extra Points newsletter did some back-of-the-napkin math on which college sports program is doing the most travel during the 2023-24 academic season. The answer? Air Force men’s hockey, at a jaw-dropping 16,611 miles. For context, that’s eight times South Carolina football’s longest round-trip (to Norman, Oklahoma) in 2024. Or, more than 16 times the distance The Proclaimers would walk just to be the man to fall down at your door.

An update on the TTFA reader referral program

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