The Slow, Painful Death of Sports Twitter

What was once an essential and joyous gathering place has become a wasteland under Elon Musk.

On Saturday evening, the Twitter/X account of ESPN superstar NBA reporter Adrian Wojnarowski — the most plugged-in reporter in the sport, purveyor of the ubiquitous Woj Bomb — got hacked.

WOJ hacked. dont click on this pic.twitter.com/87zg5Z7bPN

— vladdy (@rtdepartment) February 24, 2024

This was up for about an hour before Woj regained access to his account and deleted it. What was remarkable about that hour was just how many people — frankly, myself included — legitimately thought the inauthentic tweet might have been real. Partly this is because Woj, for all his reportorial acumen, is well-known for back scratching sources when he needs to. But mostly, it’s because the fake message blended right into the background of Twitter in the age of Musk. It seems like almost every sports tweet now involves complex gambling props, crypto scams or some kind of political crossover from the forever culture wars, usually related to transgender athletes or Aaron Rodgers. Sports Twitter was once one of the most joyous parts of the platform, even in the darker pre-Musk days _ a place where you could jump on and just scream “aksdfjaslkd;fj;las jf;l!!!!!!!!” when your team won a championship, or interact with actual professional athletes, or just chat with people who happened to be watching the same game you were at the same time. Now, as with the rest of the platform, it feels as if you’re locked in a room with the worst people on earth. Sports Twitter, at last, has been enshittified.

Just a few months ago, the Times argued that Sports Twitter was the last real community on the platform still standing, inspired by an emoji-riddled Tweet from Rangers outfielder Adolis Garcia hours after he’d helped his team reach the World Series, in which he taunted Astros fans who had booed him. But that it was notable for a player to go on Twitter and stir up opposing fans, or say anything interesting at all, is indicative of a larger problem: There’s no upside to entering the fray anymore. Want to celebrate Caitlin Clark’s achievements? A flock of assholes show up to tell you women’s sports are lame. Want to express a harmless opinion on LeBron vs. Jordan? Look out for the Nazis. Want to talk to ask your favorite beat reporter a question? If they’re smart, they bolted months ago. What was once a unique opportunity for insight into a player’s personality, a way to break down the wall between them and their fans — has now become empty brand management just like everything else. Kevin Durant and LeBron James, two inner-circle Hall of Famers, once showed themselves on Twitter in a way that was both novel and refreshing; James once called President Trump “U Bum,” and Durant once told me that he believed Twitter was “the central connection to me and my fans.” (As those who followed him witnessed on a daily basis, it was also the central connection for Durant to get in hilarious fights with random strangers on the internet, and even get caught using a burner account.) Now? LeBron only posts corporate platitudes, and Durant has only tweeted nine times all year. Can you blame them?

The first athlete I ever saw posting on Twitter was Shaquille O’Neal, a man who is always up for talking about anything, forever. Perhaps unsurprisingly, O’Neal was one of the earliest stars to understand the inherent goofiness of the platform — that it was a good place to just play around. Shaq would go on and just let you know he was in Texas:

The stars at nite r big n bright clap clap clap clap deep n da heart of texas, im n dallas

— SHAQ (@SHAQ) December 4, 2008

Or that he had a random song stuck in his head:

How come i have the mr rogers neighborhhood theme song stuk n my head, iz he still alive

— SHAQ (@SHAQ) November 29, 2008

But Shaq’s Twitter is now nothing but Pepsi ads and the occasional gambling testimonial. It’s not because Shaq has become less interesting. It’s because he is smart and likes to have fun. And smart people don’t go on Twitter to have fun anymore; hardly any athletes do. Sure, you can head to Threads or Bluesky if you want, where the conversation is more civil. But the vibe is so sleepy you might as well be talking to yourself. The wall is back up. Want to hear what a player actually thinks about something? Now you better subscribe to their podcast.

But this goes beyond a bygone window into athletes’ personalities. One of the nice things about sports is that they provide concrete, factual results, with clear winners and losers: You can argue about the effects of public policy, or about the ending of The Zone of Interest, but you can’t argue with the scoreboard. Sports fans like to debate, but at the end of the day, we do get answers. So we need reliable information. And, as anyone trying to find any information about the Gaza War, the election or UFOs knows, a core utility of Twitter — to discover information as fast as you can — has largely collapsed. Twitter had always been essential on days like the NBA (or MLB) Trading Deadline, but as verification has become a subscription-based business, it’s nearly impossible to tell who is breaking what anymore. At the MLB Trade Deadline this year, Detroit Tigers announcer Matt Shepard tweeted a fake story from a fake account reporting that his team had traded away pitcher Michael Lorenzen, confusing thousands — ok, dozens — of Tigers fans. Zach Lowe, the best NBA reporter (and maybe the best sports reporter, period), is not verified and has multiple impersonators on Twitter, and, not coincidentally, has mostly abandoned the platform outside of rote links to his own work, most of which has had its traffic throttled anyway in the last year. If I don’t have access to the best reporters on Twitter—if I can’t even tell what they are—then what are we even doing here?

Obviously, people are still talking about sports on Twitter. It remains the best place in the world to hop on and raise your fists to the sky when your team loses. (I do it myself occasionally.) But the joy of finding other people who care as much about this dumb stuff as you do, or the thrill of a communal hey-someone’s-throwing-a-no-hitter-right-now moment playing out online, has mostly been replaced by a never-ending doom loop of gambling tips and people going through the motions of pretending they’re actually arguing with each other. There is no discovery or even social media’s once- reliable temporary release from loneliness: It’s just one more pile of mud to slog through. Even the simple pleasure of finding strangers to bounce jokes off is gone. In 2016, on Twitter’s 10th anniversary, Vox’s Jon Bois—now more famous for his incredible video series Secret Base —compiled the “35 best sports Tweets of all time” for SB Nation, which included old chestnuts like Peter Gammons’ butt tweets, All-Pro linebackers tweeting about their farts and Patricia Lockwood summing up everything I’ve thought about sports in less than 140 characters:

To me watching Sports is like watching a bunch of steaks who came to life & are trying violently to put themselves back together into a cow

— Patricia Lockwood (@TriciaLockwood) January 6, 2013

To read those tweets now is to be beamed back in time, much longer than eight years ago; it’s like visiting a Civil War reenactment, or Conan O’Brien’s old-timey baseball game. Sports Twitter outlasted political and media Twitter, but when a hacked crypto tweet is indistinguishable from a Woj Bomb, the jig is up. Nothing has replaced it. Nothing ever will. But maybe that’s a good thing. After all: They’re still playing all the games. Maybe we can just, you know, watch them now.