The fact that 76% of developers responding to the GDC survey still use twitter in the face of clear evidence that the site is crumbling to pieces and may go bankrupt at any moment is a real moment to me of like... man, inertia is a powerful thing
a mere 10% of respondents having tried any of the new alternatives is esp fascinating to me - I feel like there's a popular perception that bluesky is "the new twitter" among its users but clearly brands and marketers don't feel the same way
I can't help but wonder if, when twitter eventually fully collapses, we're going to see a moment where a huge number of devs are just... caught out and have to rebuild from scratch. Like if you were going to get out, the time to start getting out is "as soon as humanly possible". It feels actively dangerous to me to not be at least trying to build up elsewhere as a hedge.
I guess we'll see.
Rechosting here rather than at the bottom of a very long reply chain, but responding to a lot of the overall discussion here: I can't emphasize enough how much Twitter isn't real life.
This is something I've thought about for a few years: Important people in the games industry are not (and were not, pre-Musk) on Twitter. They might have an account but they're not posting, and they're not reading posts. There are exceptions, of course, but by and large the director-level folks, the business guys, people who matter especially on the AAA side are simply not using social media professionally, or if they are it's just LinkedIn.
Many, many managers, directors, and leads in AAA are guys you've never in your life heard of and who are not on social media in a professional capacity. "Game dev twitter" was always a bubble within the industry, and it was a bubble of mostly junior people trying to be noticed by the rest of the bubble made up of mostly junior people.
I think a lot of people are in deep with a very bad misevaluation what Twitter was worth to them professionally. I'm not saying it was never worth being on the platform to anyone, but plenty of people got enamored with the idea that they could build clout and then convert that clout into professional access - jobs, funding, connections. And I think the reality is that for the most part, clout didn't really translate into any of that.
A lot of younger people coming into (or trying to enter) the industry thought that Twitter was a place where they could get 'noticed' or ingratiate themselves into certain circles, and the truth of it is that in a lot of cases the person you'd want to know your name is simply not on Twitter to read your posts at all.
And I think bluesky is kind of failing exactly because it doesn't have the aura of illusory importance that Twitter has... leaving only a website that's unpleasant to be on and full of unpleasant people, which is ultimately what Twitter was.
Also, if you're just trying to get the word out about what you do or what you make or what game you're about to start selling on Steam next month, I'll say this: The few people in community/social at AAA publishers I talked to made it sound like Twitter was 100% dead from an engagement perspective back in, like, 2018-19. That lines up with what I noticed on the media side, the bottom dropped out of Twitter well before the pandemic started, let alone the ownership change. You might have a lot of followers, but they ain't clicking on your links.
Go somewhere else!*
*But do it for your own personal sanity and/or because the owner of Twitter is a fucking piece of shit, not because you think you'll replace 100% of whatever you think your level of engagement on social media should be. At this point I get similar or better engagement out of Mastodon, BlueSky, and, on occasion, even Threads. But it isn't like some massive boom of clicks. Spread yourself out. It's a hassle, but what else are you going to do? Keep hanging out with the porn and crypto bots that spam replies on Twitter?
