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I WAS at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas, in 2007, the year that Twitter turned the hallways into a marketing prank. Flat-screen monitors in the corridors broadcast a Twitter feed comprised almost entirely of people at SXSW, talking about SXSW. Frankly, my friends and I thought it was stupid.

We kept asking what this idiotic app was for. Answers were confused and various: it was for talking about things that were happening while they happened (thus creating fear of missing out, whose acronym, FOMO, hadn鈥檛 yet become popular); it was for telling interactive stories in tiny chunks; it was for posting links to cat pictures. At a late-night SXSW party, one hacker told me that he had discovered the perfect way to use Twitter: he had programmed a vibrator to 鈥渞ead鈥� Twitter and respond to all-caps tweets by vibrating more rapidly. We all took turns trying to make it vibrate as much as possible.

A few months later, my friends convinced me to join Twitter. They had all signed up, despite making fun of it. So I created an account to experience the latest techno-obsession of my generation, and stuck around for the 鈥淚 can haz cheezburger鈥� links. Twitter鈥檚 mix of lunch commentary and personal status updates (鈥淚 hung out with @boatymcboatface and @princeharry!鈥�) felt very similar to other early social network experiments like MySpace and Tribe. I fully expected it to float into the grungy corner of the afterlife reserved for vapourware.

Now, 13 years later, I can鈥檛 show you my very first tweet because I pay a few dollars a month for a service that deletes all my tweets that are more than a year old. That鈥檚 right 鈥� I don鈥檛 shell out cash to use Twitter, but to keep my presence extremely limited.

It isn鈥檛 that I鈥檓 worried about some intrepid investigator discovering that I once said terrible things. The social world of Twitter has changed so much that I鈥檓 no longer comfortable sharing my older tweets, which feel a lot like private messages now. They were written for a few dozen people who were at most one degree of separation from my real-life friends. I wrote about where I was hanging out, my moods and what I ate for lunch. Now my tweets go out to tens of thousands of followers, most of them strangers, and are occasionally shared among anti-science types who say they would like to see me dead, and who send me regular updates about their homicidal feelings.

鈥淭hat鈥檚 right, I don鈥檛 shell out cash to use Twitter, but to keep my presence on it extremely limited鈥�

These days, I never reveal my physical location on Twitter, unless it is to invite people to a public event I plan to attend. I would never talk about my deep personal feelings, because of the aforementioned ill-wishers. And I rarely mention what I ate for lunch, because my followers don鈥檛 care and I don鈥檛 want to waste their time. I tweet almost exclusively about my professional work as an author and journalist. Once in a while I make a joke that鈥檚 moderately funny.

This is what it looks like when a social-media app grows up. The posts that were once a private conversation with friends are now like talking on some surreal street corner where you are surrounded by mobs of angry ghosts heckling you and threatening your family. Like a lot of people on the platform, I use apps to block trolls and bots. But that isn鈥檛 a foolproof solution. You can meet more unsavoury characters in 1 hour on Twitter than you can wandering through the rough parts of a city for days.

There are a lot of reasons for this. Twitter鈥檚 efforts to stop abuse and bullying on the site over the years haven鈥檛 worked, and it seems its community rules still allow controversial celebrities and politicians to remain on the platform. Plus, Twitter has transformed from a nerdy cat meme haven to a highly politicised, contentious public arena. It isn鈥檛 fun anymore.

Investors in Twitter are leaning into politics, too. Billionaire Paul Singer recently invested an enormous amount of money in the company, and openly attempted to oust its CEO and founder, Jack Dorsey, in a takeover. Singer is best known for two things: strong support for Trump-style Republicans, and an uncanny ability to seize control of large, flailing companies. Under Singer鈥檚 guidance, the social media site could shift to the right politically.

In the aftermath of a change like that, Twitter鈥檚 relevance might rapidly fade 鈥� anyone who doesn鈥檛 care about right-wing politics will start looking for alternative places to post cat pictures and stories about CRISPR. The technology behind Twitter is simple, and if people begin seeking out new platforms, the tech industry will build them. It took longer than I thought it would, but Twitter seems headed for the techie afterlife. You can decide whether it will make it to the good place or the bad one.