The state of Twitter is not what it was when Nick Wright was building his audience on the platform. That has made it less painful for him to watch the app’s decline.
On Colin Cowherd’s podcast this week, Wright said the platform was already “too toxic” before Elon Musk bought and began messing with the platform.
“I don’t care how ‘above it’ you claim to be,” the FS1 host said. “If you have thousands of strangers saying basically, ‘You suck,’ it’s going to get in your head somehow. And the flip side is if you have thousands of strangers saying ‘you’re the greatest, it’s going to get in your head somehow. The things that get the most applause on social media are not necessarily representative of the things that are what I use social media for, which is as a professional vehicle.”
To combat that toxicity, Wright says he had made a point to interact with only verified athletes, journalists and broadcasters. He says the changes Twitter made to its verification process have been some of Musk’s most damaging moves to the platform impacts.
“Musk ripping off that verified tab to mean anything, was to me very damaging to my ability to engage with anyone on Twitter. Very damaging. So that, to me, was a shame.”
He said that “Twitter is falling apart.” What shocks Wright the most is that he isn’t particularly upset about it. He says that wouldn’t have been true just three years ago
“I think I would’ve been like ‘Oh my god, I’ve like spent so much time building up an audience here, doing all this stuff,’” he told Cowherd. “And now that it’s happening, I’m a little relieved. Like if this thing goes away…I’m not gonna quit it. I can’t. Like, I’m pretty sure I’m addicted to Twitter. But if I have my platform and Twitter starts to splinter off into whatever the hell it’s turning into, I’m not gonna be that sad.”
