It Has Finally Become Clear What Elon Musk Wants Twitter to Be
Reading Time: 7 minutesSomething that—for good reason—it has never been before., Why Elon Musk keeps making Twitter worse.
Elon Musk is closing in on a half-year of owning Twitter. It’s been an extraordinary disaster: Musk bought the company last October for $44 billion, paying most of it himself or with money loaned to him that will require Twitter to make regular, neck-crushing interest payments. Musk now assesses that Twitter is worth $20 billion, which tells you he both overpaid by a lot and has destroyed a comical amount of value in a short time. (Twitter was not a $44 billion company at any point in 2022 to anyone except Musk, but it was closer to $30 billion than $20 billion, even in a down market, before Musk swooped in.) Musk has lost billions on paper, and everyone who uses Twitter has gotten a jankier platform that breaks often, sometimes because Musk is actively breaking it. If he were the CEO of a normal public company, instead of Elon Musk, CEO of a privatized Twitter that he decided to buy on whim and then got stuck with, his board might have fired him already. Where Musk does report to a regular board, at Tesla, at least he’s got a big stock price on his side.
But Musk at Twitter is an even less normal CEO who lacks normal constraints, so everyone who uses Twitter is along for the ride to, well, wherever this is all going. In the week before Musk took over, he started to talk less like the ‘free speech’ zealot he has lately portrayed himself as and more like a businessman concerned with mitigating damage of his overpayment. I thought he’d be a bit more tempered than he has been in catering to trolls by, for example, reinstating some of them from bans and asking others for advice. But the most noticeable effect Musk’s ownership has had, for most people, is that Twitter has gotten weirder. In addition to more outages and buttons not working right, Musk has made it hard to tell which verified accounts are ‘notable’ and which are the product of $8 monthly subscriptions. (Soon, that should be clearer.) People now see lots of tweets from people they don’t follow, as a default setting that a user can change. Figuring out how a tweet will travel around the internet is hard, but at least everyone can see impression counts that may or may not be accurate. Twitter is, in general, less predictable. If it’s any consolation, the new owner has probably had even less fun with it than you have.
It’s easy to assume that Musk’s denigration of Twitter has been ideologically driven. It’s plain to see that he’s found a fawning group of right-wing friends and fans who have cheerleaded his every move, and Musk’s ‘free speech’ mission at the platform, paper-thin as it is, maps nicely onto theirs. But the biggest changes Musk has made to Twitter have been economic in nature, despite his claim during his bid that the economics were a nonpriority for him. (What’s the point of being the richest person in the world if you can’t lose money?) Some of Musk’s cash-driven changes have been obvious: whittling the payroll down from nearly 8,000 to less than 2,000, reportedly not paying bills, closing data centers, and trying to pressure users into buying subscriptions despite making almost no discernible improvements to his product. Maybe he’s got both political and financial reasons for molding Twitter in his image. But everything Musk has done to date points in one direction about his vision for his new company/toy, whether for political or financial ends. Twitter’s new owner wants Twitter to be something it’s never, ever been: a first screen. It’s not going well.
What is Twitter, existentially speaking? In a way, it’s one of the internet’s ultimate destinations, a place where people go to spend time. If I looked up my phone’s screen time and battery usage in a given week, Twitter would lead every app in a romp. But Twitter isn’t a thing that most people like to consume on its own. It’s not a place—like Instagram or TikTok—that was built for users to get lost within. Twitter’s calling card is the quick conveyance of information, rather than the endless consumption of video or audio. Twitter is fundamentally a side screen, not a main screen. Watching a football game or Succession? You’d probably rather talk about it in real time on Twitter than on Reels. Looking for an activity unto itself, however? That’s not really Twitter, and it never has been. You don’t look forward to a half-hour of thumbing through tweets before bed the same way you’d relish a nightly endless TikTok scroll (although, if you are an addict, you have absolutely spent more time than you wish looking at tweets in bed). Most of the time, if you’re on Twitter, you’re doing something else or mainlining information before leaving.
Relatedly, Twitter has earned billions in ad sales over the years, but it’s simply not the financial juggernaut that peer platforms are. It turns out it’s harder to monetize users who are just passing through, looking at short text posts, than ones who spend hours in a trance looking at videos of golf shots, dogs, babies, Bachelorette contestants, infographic-laden videos about Marjorie Taylor-Greene, and life-changing chicken-and-rice recipes. One can see why Musk would like Twitter to be more of a closed ecosystem where its users are happy spending more time. Musk’s way of doing that has been the ‘For You’ feed, which now comes as the default on Twitter’s apps, though it can be changed one time so that when someone opens Twitter, they see tweets from accounts they chose to follow.
The ‘For You’ feed, which picks tweets to show a user from followed and non-followed accounts, sucks. That is in part because Musk has reportedly juiced the system to show you more of his own posts. But it mainly sucks for two other reasons: One, people want to see tweets by people they follow. The ‘follow’ function is the foundation Twitter was built on. Don’t like a lot of tweets on Twitter? Fine, you won’t see them as long as you curate your feed well enough. And two, Twitter is a text platform built on immediacy. Tweets are supposed to be seen relatively quickly after they’re sent. A tweet about live news or a game is stale within minutes sometimes, let alone the hours or days that might elapse between its publication and appearance in For You. (This was a problem before Musk took over. Even Twitter’s old management had some designs on making Twitter less like Twitter.) No such constraints exist on the big short-form video platforms, which were not conceived as ways to disseminate information rapidly—only appealingly.
Musk seems to know that the rapid distribution of short text updates is what Twitter is good at. It comes through when he talks about the platform’s potential in news. Twitter is indeed better at news than TikTok or Instagram or YouTube. Musk’s moves to make it a less hospitable place for news organizations are thus extremely bizarre and seem like an example of his ideological brain winning out over good business. Several million people chose to follow NPR on Twitter before Musk pushed the station away this week.
As he frays Twitter’s advantage in the area it was built to be good at, Musk will continue to hope Twitter becomes something it probably can’t be. When he agreed to give up his legal fight against Twitter’s old board of directors and buy the company, he said that Twitter could help him build an ‘everything app.’ He brought the subject up again this week. Musk would like Twitter (or an association of sites including Twitter) to be an app that’s harder to close and easier to turn into a profit generator. That seems to include building a payments platform on the app, something that not a single person I’ve ever met in real life has expressed any interest in Twitter handling for them. Let’s see how it pans out.
None of this needed to affect the day-to-day Twitter experience for most people who use the site. But because Musk has alienated advertisers whose payments were already not enough to make Twitter the cash cow he prefers it to be, he’s lessened the quality of the platform in other ways (or tried to). Because Twitter doesn’t have all the addictive qualities to keep users engaged on their own, Musk in December tried banning links to competitors before walking it back under public pressure. He tried something similar over the past week with Substack, the newsletter platform that now has a Twittery feed feature. Twitter isn’t an everything app, but it can make it more inconvenient for people to go to other apps. Setting aside the obvious conflict with Musk’s free speech ethos, engagement via suppressing links to competitors will probably fall short as a way to make more people spend more time on Twitter.
A major part of Twitter’s appeal, historically, was how the site played with other parts of the internet. It wasn’t a big traffic driver to news websites, as any web analytics professional would tell you, but Twitter welcomed anyone who had a song to sing or a product to shill, be it news or Coca-Cola or virtually any kind of consumer good. People sometimes call Twitter a digital town square, but it has functioned more like a mall. Maybe you didn’t go into the storefronts often, but if you were on Twitter enough, you became familiar with them and more likely to engage with them at some point. And the people you wanted to hear from were all there.
There was symbiosis in that relationship between Twitter and the rest of the web, just as there was when Musk patted some handpicked journalists on the head and gave them access to a bunch of documents that they all claimed revealed an enormous scandal under Twitter’s old leadership. Everyone was selling something: newsletter subscriptions from the writers, and a veneer of free-speech support from Musk and Twitter. At least for the portion of the audience that frets a lot about Big Tech censorship, Twitter was a place to be. But because Musk wanted it to be the only place to be, he got into it with the very platform that hosted much of the Twitter Files reporting, then saw one of his former favorite reporters leave his platform. Matt Taibbi said that Musk told him he could publish future reporting on Twitter itself, but the writer declined. Of course he did. Nobody thinks that Twitter is a good place to publish writing. The company has tried its hand at the longer-form publication game before, and it hasn’t worked. Twitter isn’t everything to all people.
The reason these moves won’t serve Musk well isn’t that they so glaringly conflict with his self-image as a crusader for free expression on the internet. His aim is to make Twitter a more closed environment where its users do more things and grant a larger slice of their attention on a more regular basis. It won’t work, because Twitter wasn’t built to bear that kind of load. And the company wouldn’t have to evolve so dramatically if someone hadn’t spent $44 billion on what is, not for our purposes but for his, a lemon.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/04/elon-musk-twitter-substack-free-speech.html
Ref: slate
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