This is funny to me, because while I used Twitter, I mostly did it to broadcast mundane things to my friends, and never really participated in the "Twitter comm

This is funny to me, because while I used Twitter, I mostly did it to broadcast mundane things to my friends, and never really participated in the "Twitter community", whatever that actually means to people. Facebook cloned one of Twitter's core features with the 'Status' prompt that served as an effective replacement for real-life friends, while Tumblr was a better place where you could pseudonymously post long-form content with many of the same pressures and rewards of virality, but its many different communities that had a lower propensity to devolve into flaming and trolling. By the time professionals' "I'm leaving Twitter" posts became unremarkable and trite, the mass exodus was well on its way: to Facebook for its more granual privacy/audience controls, Medium for its analytics, social features, and perceived professionalism, or to the social black hole, having been disenchanted with an overtly social, always public presence altogether. It's always bittersweet (though mostly bitter) when communities falter and fall apart, but to me Twitter was never a good place to build a community anyway. Most of its advantages came from media and commentators fuming over having missed the boat on Facebook, so there was a concentrated effort to never make that mistake again: hashtags and Tweets were everywhere more so than AOL keywords ever were, which quickly made Twitter mandatory for people who wanted to feel like they could be "influencers", or hang out in their company. In this social and reputational gold rush, only a few came out ahead, which should not be a surprise to anyone, as much as it frustrates those who tried.