Christopher Bouzy – "Building a Platform Like Twitter is Not Difficult"

When Elon Musk's reign of toxic chaos began, Christopher Bouzy didn't just go looking for a rival place to post. He joined the crowded race to create one. (It got difficult.)

- By Brendan I. Koerner

Looking back, I believe I can pinpoint the exact day I loved Twitter most: May 24, 2011. I was in a small Oregon town for work, coping with loneliness and stress in a shabby motel. With a 22-ounce bottle of high-proof beer, I whiled away the evening by churning out a random assortment of tweets: an article I'd read about the hunt for wild garlic in Quebec; images of an apocalyptic Los Angeles mural; my reasons for adoring the 1985 B movie American Ninja. In a reflective moment, I also managed to craft an earnest observation about my job: The more social media makes journalism an Everyman's game, I mused, the more I'm inspired to dig deep for non-digitized sources.

To my surprise, that tweet earned what seemed at the time like an avalanche of approval-a whopping six retweets, plus an admiring reply from a minor internet celebrity. This validation sent me over the moon: The account I'd always thought of as mere public scratch paper actually had an audience that considered my ramblings worthwhile.

I kept chasing that same high over the next decade-plus, but it mostly proved elusive, even when my retweet counts occasionally soared into the thousands. As the platform ballooned, I became self-conscious about drafting tweets. I worried that any slight misstep in phrasing or context might reveal to the masses that I am, in fact, an idiot. I regularly found myself sucked into trivial controversies over some pundit's stupid take; once the thrill of scrolling through the resulting dunks faded, I'd feel dirty for having once again been turned into a cog in the Global Outrage Machine.