Everything I hate is on Twitter – how can the alternatives compete? | Zoe Williams

When Elon Musk took over the platform, the downward slide was depressing. But then, the horror may always have been a big part of its appeal

And he couldn't do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here." The end of Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater is a perfect distillation of how many of us felt about Twitter when Elon Musk bought it last October. But I didn't know that from reading it, even though I have; I knew that because someone faster, smarter, probably younger, with a better memory (@hayleycampbell), put it on Twitter.

So even though everything I hate is there, so is a lot of what I love. My father never owned a TV, because he said every time you thought you were good at something - cooking, repartee, being alive - on the telly, there'd be someone who was better at it than you. I thought that was just an unlovely overhang of a 40s childhood: the whole point of repartee, and indeed cooking and being alive, is that the more people who can do it, the better. Also, I really wanted a TV.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist