It’s fair to say that neither Colin Cowherd nor Nick Wright are happy with the direction that Twitter has taken under Elon Musk. Cowherd said he was willing to give Musk a chance, but described the user experience as “more toxic than it’s ever been.”
On a recent episode of The Colin Cowherd Podcast, the two Fox Sports employees delved into a bevy of topics but spent a significant amount of time talking about the future of social media and the impact it has on their livelihoods.
“I find the Elon Musk Twitter experience—and I try to be fair about it—just an increasingly poor experience,” Cowherd said.
Cowherd isn’t on Twitter at all, while Wright has made it a point of emphasis to not look at his mentions. Around the time Wright started to have a national profile, he decided that he would almost never interact within his mentions, except if any professional athletes, journalists or broadcasters were engaging with him, whether it was positive or negative.
“It was too toxic,” Wright said. “I don’t care how ‘above it’ you claim to be. If you have thousands of strangers saying basically, ‘You suck,’ it’s going to get in your head somehow. And the flip side is if you have thousands of strangers saying ‘you’re the greatest, it’s going to get in your head somehow. The things that get the most applause on social media are not necessarily representative of the things that are what I use social media for, which is as a professional vehicle.”
In the pre-Musk days of Twitter, as a verified user, you had a separate mentions tab that would only show you tweets from other verified users. That is no longer the case for Wright, who told Cowherd that he is “blissfully unaware” these days of how many people on the internet hate him.
“Musk ripping off that verified tab to mean anything, was to me very damaging to my ability to engage with anyone on Twitter. Very damaging,” he said. “So that to me was a shame.”
Wright said he has 600,000 followers on Twitter and is blessed to have a platform, but it’s not his only outlet. He’ll likely begrudgingly be a late addition to some of these new social media apps that are rivaling Twitter, which includes BlueSky, Spill and Threads, among others.
“Twitter falling apart, while it’ll be harder to follow the news, might be good for me because I’m compulsively reading the news on it,” he said. “I could probably catch up on the news three times a day, instead of every three minutes.”
Give Cowherd and Wright credit, both of them have for the most part been able to cultivate a social media experience where they are unaware of the criticism that comes from the same 30 people screaming into the void. At the same time, that doesn’t mean they’re happy with the direction of Twitter or social media, for that matter.
“If you had told me three years ago, [that] an unhinged bazillionaire is gonna buy Twitter and seemingly do a Brewster’s Millions run it into the ground competition, and what’s gonna happen is it’s gonna splinter off into a half-dozen Twitter clones…If you would have told me that three years ago, I think I’d have been devastated,” Wright said. “I think I would’ve been like ‘Oh my god, I’ve like spent so much time building up an audience here, doing all this stuff.’
“And now that it’s happening, I’m a little relieved. Like if this thing goes away…I’m not gonna quit it. I can’t. Like, I’m pretty sure I’m addicted to Twitter. But if I have my platform and Twitter starts to splinter off into whatever the hell it’s turning into, I’m not gonna be that sad.”
So there’s the thing, neither Cowherd nor Wright will be heartbroken if Twitter goes belly up, but they sure seem to be on the same page that the direction of the social media platform is pretty bleak.