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.
This is true in all the other tech circles I've been in too: web dev, web infrastructure, legal policy, security, cryptography, and more. Yes, there are very active twitter communities for all of those. Yes there are people who have lots of clout and institutional power in those circles, and yes there are people chasing that clout and hoping to get noticed.
But those big fish? They're less than 5% of the people in the industry working at their level. You don't need to be noticed by them, and making lots of noise on twitter won't get you noticed by the other 95% of their peers.