What I already knew about social media

In 2014, Nate Silver had one million followers on Twitter and every link he published drove real traffic to his site. In 2025, he has three million, but the traffic social media brings to his Substack has become irrelevant. Those two numbers alone tell the story of a decade.

The title of his piece is “Social media has become a freak show” — which is more or less what we all think. Except Silver backs it up with data, and from the very particular vantage point of someone who used social media as an editorial channel for fifteen years, with millions of readers on the other end.

Silver is an American statistician and journalist who became famous for predicting the results of the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections with near-surgical precision. He founded FiveThirtyEight, the data journalism site that changed how American elections are covered, taking it first under the umbrella of the New York Times, then ESPN/ABC News. When Disney dismantled the newsroom in 2023, Silver left and founded Silver Bulletin, his Substack newsletter, where he continues doing what he’s always done: reading the numbers and saying what he sees.

His is not yet another sociological reflection on what social media has done to people’s behaviour (though I’d happily read a well-argued one on the subject). It’s a quantitative reconstruction from the perspective of a user with hundreds of thousands of followers and the bearing of a news outlet. And what he describes resonates, from my far more modest position, with my own experience.

When, in the first half of the 2010s, I was an active and voracious Twitter user, my experience was very different from that of the people around me. I remember fellow translators telling me, disheartened: “Twitter is evil”, “Twitter is a madhouse”, “Twitter is a cesspool”. I reacted with genuine surprise because my Twitter was a wonderful place where I found first-hand information on any current event, sharp analyses of the same event within hours, fascinating people to follow, delicious flame wars I enjoyed while munching metaphorical popcorn, and overall quality information tailored to my needs.

Silver describes exactly that arc — and quantifies it:

On Facebook, every now and then, a FiveThirtyEight article would “go viral”. When this happened, it seemed literally almost completely random. It wasn’t even particularly well-correlated with the headline. And it was inversely correlated with the depth and quality of the article. But here’s the thing: that “viral” traffic was almost worthless. A lot of it quite literally consisted of people who visited the site for 5 to 30 seconds, read a paragraph or two, and never returned.

Back in the mid-2010s, Twitter rewarded newsworthiness, subject-matter expertise, […] Furthermore, the pre-Elon versions of Twitter were always surprisingly happy to let you direct traffic off of their platform.

By the late 2010s, Twitter would “evolve” in a direction that was more partisan, less pluralistic, […] For lack of a better term, it also became much more woke. The enforcement of groupthink was rigid, not unlike what Bluesky has become today.

And this perhaps explains why — like many others — I moved to Bluesky, but half-heartedly, and never found what I used to find on Twitter in its golden days. Today I rarely open it, look for a user or a topic I’m interested in, and close it. And if I can’t find what I’m looking for, I hold my nose and open X.

Silver then confirms something that anyone publishing content online has by now internalised:

I feel confident in asserting that social media is a secondary source of business for [Silver Bulletin] and is trending toward being a tertiary one — and that this is probably also true for most other publishers. That’s very different from a decade ago, when Facebook was considered the Golden Goose.

Then there’s the picture of what X has become (accompanied in the article by an eloquent graphic well worth the click):

It’s not hard to notice that Twitter has become extremely right-leaning. But I’d argue there’s an equally important trend: the top accounts are of incredibly low quality. Elon, with the algorithmic boost he built in for himself, is at the eye of the storm, of course. But “Catturd” literally gets far more engagement than the New York Times, for instance.

Without really wanting to comment on individual accounts — there are some exceptions — the liberal-leaning accounts that remain prominent on Twitter aren’t much better. They’re partisan and combative, sometimes peddling misinformation.

Twitter feels like a ghost town. It’s still useful for some topics: the AI discourse on the platform is often relatively robust, for instance. But for something like the war in Iran, it’s next to useless. Links to external websites are substantially punished, and none of the workarounds are particularly helpful. So the tangible rewards from still having 3 million followers can be surprisingly marginal. However, my account is hardly alone in this regard. The New York Times has 53 million followers, and yet its tweets often produce only a few hundred likes, retweets, and replies even when they reveal urgent, breaking news.

Then, towards the end, there’s an observation that tells us something important (I wonder how well known) about Substack too:

…and what thrives on Substack often reflects a correction from oversights by executives in the mainstream media, who often chase away their best customers in an effort to fight the last war or to pursue their own political or ideological objectives.

Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate in economics, wrote for the New York Times for twenty-five years. At the end of 2024 he left: editing had become increasingly intrusive, his internal newsletter was suspended because he was writing “too often”. On Substack he now publishes almost daily and has surpassed 500,000 subscribers. Legacy media drives away its best voices and Substack picks them up. Which is also why I hope Substack will resist the temptation to become a social network itself.

Here is Silver’s full article.