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\nApparently Elon Musk officially owns Twitter now.<\/p>\n
\nApparently Elon Musk officially owns Twitter now.<\/p>\n
Twitter\u2019s easily my favorite social network. It\u2019s always fit in with how my mind works (at least when I use it with clients like Tweetbot). I\u2019ve often found community on Twitter, and Twitter is influential and consequential. Revolutions have taken place because of Twitter. Before news is news, it\u2019s often on Twitter.<\/p>\n
And now it belongs to rich dipshit Elon Musk. Though if it makes you feel better, he\u2019ll probably become less rich because of this acquisition!<\/p>\n
Twitter has been severely mismanaged for its entire existence. They famously procrastinated on a business model until finally settling on \u201cI guess we should put ads in things.\u201d In the early days people almost exclusively used Twitter via mobile apps made by third parties, but then Twitter got increasingly developer hostile and pushed third party apps away, presumably to help make it easier to put ads in things (though they are coming back around lately to third party Twitter experiences). They\u2019ve gotten more and more bloated as a company, and they\u2019ve struggled to articulate a stance on content moderation, though in reality it\u2019s played out as being uncomfortably permissive toward Nazi types.<\/p>\n
Elon\u2019s got his work cut out for him (which is unfortunate given how many CEO jobs he juggles). Even though I really don\u2019t care for him, I do care about Twitter, so the consulting wing of Icanthascheezburger is laying out this simple three-point plan:<\/p>\n
Twitter bleeds money. They have only turned a profit in two of the last ten years. Musk is quite wealthy on paper but actually isn\u2019t particularly cash-rich and probably will want to get Twitter in the black in the next year or two.<\/p>\n
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And he\u2019s hinted as much; he\u2019s talked a big game about firing as much as 75% of staff, and that\u2019s probably coming from a feeling of sticker shock, but also for Twitter\u2019s size, 4600 employees is a lot and it would make sense to learn the ins and outs of the company and strip down to the bare essentials, then build from there. The strategy worked pretty well for Steve Jobs when he took over Apple. Of course, Steve Jobs was smart enough not to run his mouth with some estimated number of jobs he planned to cut before he even took the wheel.<\/p>\n
And as of press time, it seems Musk isn\u2019t troubling himself to learn what teams are doing before firing them wholesale.<\/p>\n
To boil Twitter down to its purest essence would be to describe it as a relatively small, relatively unstructured microblogging platform, where people build up their communities by hand-picking the people they want to follow. It\u2019s a place for information junkies because the content is so concise that it\u2019s almost a stream of consciousness. It\u2019s deeply candid and honest.<\/p>\n
And Twitter has spent most of its post-IPO years doing its very best to resist that.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t blame them; Twitter\u2019s not a mass market product like Facebook, or most mass media. That\u2019s why so many news sites take a single tweet and turn it into a 500-word article. Twitter is opinionated in how it works, and it caters to those information junkies who want the raw discourse injected right into their veins. Information travels around Twitter before it becomes news. It\u2019s a primary source where you get the word directly from important people, not filtered through a PR person.<\/p>\n
This Twitter is extremely valuable (and I think Musk correctly understands that), but it\u2019s not valuable in the sense that Facebook got valuable. Twitter is a tool of massive cultural importance and consequence, but it\u2019s not a network that will have billions of ad revenue-generating users, and for it to become that it would have to become something fundamentally different.<\/p>\n
Twitter needs to do what Apple did post-Jobs returning, and what Crocs did a few years back: go back to basics and focus on what it\u2019s best at.<\/p>\n
But unlike Apple and Crocs, Twitter has to reckon with the issue that core Twitter was never a financial success, and that has to be solved for. I firmly believe it\u2019s a solvable problem; the world clearly wants a thing like Twitter to exist.<\/p>\n
Some ideas for how to accomplish this:<\/p>\n
Twitter\u2019s been trying to build out a bunch of new stuff over the past couple of years in the hopes that one of them will have traction and catch on and presumably make Twitter money. The problem is that new products like Twitter Spaces are the kind of thing you make when you have a successful and profitable core product and you want to expand. Twitter hasn\u2019t yet made its core product profitable.<\/p>\n
Musk has hinted that he wants to turn Twitter into an \u201ceverything app\u201d like WeChat. That\u2019s a dumb idea. Now, I get why a rich dude might salivate at the idea of making a super monopolistic piece of software that everything else is built on top of and dependent on, but WeChat really only took hold in China because, well, it\u2019s China. Facebook tried doing it with Messenger awhile back and it kind of fizzled out.<\/p>\n
But once Twitter finds financial success, then it\u2019s a good time to start experimenting with totally new things. Hopefully these are things that actually build on Twitter\u2019s core, not shitty attempts to make a copy of another social network that\u2019s currently growing.<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t really predict what these things might be; Twitter has to figure this shit out for themselves. But the new features need to be Twittery.<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t quite define what I mean here, but I\u2019m thinking of things that are lightweight, fast, and concise. They\u2019re things that embrace the open web (like how tweets are accessible via public URLs, making them easy to link to and find and otherwise interact with). Good Twitter features add frictionlessnes to things, like how hashtags made it super easy to quickly jump into public conversations about things, or how quote tweets made it super easy to add some extra perspective to someone else\u2019s thought (or mercilessly roast them). Veer too far from that, and you\u2019re fundamentally making a different product. And it wouldn\u2019t be bad to do that, but don\u2019t do it under the Twitter moniker; spin up a totally new brand and app name, and experiment there.<\/p>\n
Yeah, so I really didn\u2019t mean to write this post as an unsolicited advice column for Elon Musk; I just couldn\u2019t help but dig into and enumerate Twitter\u2019s many misgivings.<\/p>\n
But what are we to do?<\/p>\n
I have severely mixed feelings. I think Twitter was getting short shrift on the public market and theoretically benefits from being private, but I have serious doubts about Elon Musk\u2019s ability to run this company well (and given that Twitter engineers were told yesterday to print out<\/em> all of their code for Tesla engineers to come review, it\u2019s confirming my suspicions that Musk likes to act before thinking).<\/p>\n But for now, I plan to stick around, assuming nothing super disruptive happens to the way I experience Twitter. I use Tweetbot to scroll through Twitter, and it\u2019s been solidly consistent, always showing me a chronological feed of tweets from exactly the people I follow and no one else. Twitter is special; it\u2019s the only place where I can follow all these specific people I care about following and see what they have to say.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s really important to me to keep investing in communities that use truly open tools.<\/p>\n This blog is itself one such thing; it\u2019s built on the open web and it\u2019s totally under my control. It\u2019s not really much of a community, though.<\/p>\n I\u2019m on micro.blog, though I\u2019m not that active on there. I\u2019m on Mastodon too, though I\u2019m not that active on there either. I am an ardent RSS user and I follow a ton of blogs, most of which are independent. But I would like to see more people who are less tech-oriented to be making blogs again. And I love the open web because it\u2019s easy to me to make my own little media bubble of exactly the things I care about, free of the bullshit of modern sites.<\/p>\n The problem with apps like Mastodon and Micro.blog (and others like Diaspora and countless other sites that sprung up) is that although they can be drop-in replacements for Twitter from a tech perspective (in the sense that they are apps for short-form microblogging on the web), Twitter isn\u2019t its apps and APIs. The heart and soul of Twitter is the community, and it would be nigh impossible for me to get everyone I follow to move to one of these other sites. It would take a mass migration of some sort, which I don\u2019t see happening unless Twitter really fucks shit up (which they totally could!).<\/p>\n