The death of Twitter won't be the dramatic explosion you might expect

• The chaos at Twitter under Elon Musk has many users already mourning the site's demise.
• But it's not dead yet, and will likely never fully die. Even failed social networks linger.

As employees flee Twitter in droves, and insiders and outsiders warn that the site may stop working at any moment, many spent last night acting as if Twitter was already dead. But as an elder millennial, I'm not quite ready to hold a funeral.

I've watched Friendster, MySpace, Xanga, LiveJournal, Google+, Flickr, Digg, and so many more rise and fall — but very few ever truly die, and very rarely in the final, fiery burst that some seem to be expecting.

So I'm confident saying Twitter won't wink out of existence, here one day and gone the next. That said, I'm also confident that Twitter won't be the same after Musk's gambit. And while Twitter has survived a lot of turmoil, and there are reasons to be optimistic about this latest pivot — well, we've seen how these things can go.

Unless Musk decides to take the company public once more, sell it for pennies on the dollar, or do something completely unpredictable (always a real possibility when Musk is involved), Twitter will end how most social networks end: a long, slow decline into irrelevance.

Here's how I think will happen:

1. Power users start to abandon ship. We've already seen some of this — it made headlines when Nibel, the pseudonymous video-game influencer respected for his ability to quickly find and share breaking news, quit Twitter in the immediate wake of Musk's acquisition. If you log on to Twitter today, you'll see plenty of other regular tweeters letting followers know where to find them on alternatives like Instagram, Tumblr, or Mastodon. Expect that to continue, especially until and unless there's more clarity on the site's future.
2. Things start to break. Company insiders have been increasingly sounding the alarm that in the wake of Twitter's massive headcount reductions, expect reliability to suffer. At first, it'll be annoying things, like new tweets taking too long to load or photos not displaying correctly. This could well turn into periodic outages, as in the famous "Failwhale" in the early days of Twitter. The combination of app unreliability and the increasingly-notable absence of power users and influencers will lead to average Twitter users spending less time on the site.
3. The flop era. Once a daily habit is broken, it's hard to get it back. If and when users stop refreshing Twitter because it's no longer reliable, they'll start spending more time on other platforms. Twitter will still be there, and some significant portion of daily active users will remain, but it will likely be a period of stagnation and decline while Musk and the remaining Twitter team focus on building back up.
4. The New Thing emerges. The ship is righted, reliability is solved (or mostly solved), and the long-promised new features finally start to take shape. At this point, it becomes a comeback story: Can the New Thing win back those lapsed users and/or break into new audiences? This, historically, is met with mixed success: While Facebook's pivot to focus on mobile paid huge dividends, MySpace's plan to become a music site fizzled out. For Twitter, we already know that Musk plans to resurrect Vine, Twitter's legendary short-form video app.
   
   There's an optimistic case to be made, for sure. If Musk's "hardcore" strategy for Twitter pans out and it becomes the "everything app" that he's long envisioned, it could reach a huge new audience. At the same time, this gambit has already alienated some of Twitter's most dedicated users and content creators, risking the service's future.
5. Trundling along. Assuming Twitter doesn't hit escape velocity in step 4, this is where we settle in for the long haul. The new site, whatever it looks like, will still keep some core number of users, which will neither grow nor shrink very rapidly. Power users who left in the earlier stages will be resettled on whatever alternate platform they chose, and probably won't come back in great numbers.

Ultimately, most social networks end up lurching along in that fifth stage, decaying but never quite dropping dead. There may never be a big finale for Twitter, just a series of "to be continued" cliffhangers as everyone but diehards stop paying attention.