Whilst quite a few of my readers will never have experienced twitter, most of you seem to have found your way here via a social media link. In fact, it’s still the case that most referrals seem to come via Twitter. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve stuck with Twitter and part of the reason that I’ve got a bit of a vested intertest in what happens to the bird app. However, even if you don’t use Twitter yourself, or have much to do with social media, there are good reasons to observe what has happened since Elon Musk’s take over and learn lessons from it.
As always, we can leap in and learn the wrong reasons. A lot of people have either left Twitter or are talking about leaving because they are unhappy with the app. It’s fascinating that quite a few have posted messages about how terrible the app is, how it no longer feels like home, how they don’t find the community they used to there. Some have even talked in terms of grief and bereavement, that they’ve lost something precious.
Now, if you are talking like that, then you probably are better off of Twitter and all other forms of social media generally, as much for your own well-being as anything. It’s time for a reality check. First, these social media apps never were “communities”. They were technological platforms designed to enable communication. Twitter identifies as a “micro-blogging” site. In other words, its somewhere that you can share news, observations, comment, opinion. The nature of it means that discussions can develop and so, it functions like a kind of text based debating forum, an evolution of the old chat rooms if you like.
Now, there are limitations and weaknesses of course. The fact that you are limited to a certain number of characters means that, even with the option of developing a thread, conversation can feel constrained. It is easier to opt for the soundbite, harder to offer nuance. Furthermore, Twitter has at times attracted people who’ve found that they can hide behind online anonymous personas and that seems to give them permission to behave in ways they may be more cautious about in normal life. It facilitates rudeness and all kinds of unpleasant and harmful behaviours.
However, we need to remember a few things here. Just as Twitter never really was a community, even if communities formed around it or made use of it, the issues I’ve described above have always been present. They are also true for other apps and sites too. It’s quite difficult to get problematic content removed on any of the social media platforms I’ve had experience of.
So, I want to caution against some of the hyperbolic commentary about what is going no and what’s gone wrong with Twitter. It probably was never as good as some people thought it was back then and I suspect it is not as bad as they are suggesting now. Twitter remains a bit of tech, a platform or vehicle that people make use of to communicate with each other. They use it to promote their own views and content, they use it to listen, observe and learn from others too.
However, I think that things have gone wrong and the wheels have been coming off. A lot of that relates to Elon Musk’s failure to understand what he was taking on. This has resulted in some bad decisions. Those decisions were in my opinion bad business decisions.
The key things that Musk has done which I think were unwise are
- He’s attempted to replace the blue tick verification system with a higher level subscription option. This is meant to remove hierarchy from the app.
- He’s made it difficult for people to link to content shared on other platforms, especially the sharing of blog content from WordPress.
In so doing, he’s shown a remarkable misunderstanding of the nature of the platform and of its users. This means that he has failed to see where and why it was successful. This seems like a major business error on his part to me. In effect, he’s taken something that was successful but perhaps not profitable and attempted to make it profitable not by learning how to harness the success but instead to get rid of the successful elements.
Twitter is primarily free to use. In that respect it functions like your average TV channel and like a lot of online sites. Revenue primarily comes from advertisers. Advertisers decide whether or not to invest in a platform like twitter on two counts. First, will it guarantee maximum exposure, will lots of people see their content and be drawn to buy their products and services? Secondly, will their association with the platform be positive in terms of their own brand image or negative.
Musk’s, actions have begun to discourage people away from Twitter and so that means both that advertisers will have less people to market to on the platform and also that association with a troubled brand is not going to be good for their reputation. Musk has exacerbated the problem by attempting to rebrand Twitter as X and lose a lot of brand activity. In fact, he has made it harder to distinguish Twitter/X from other options.
The second error he has made is that he misunderstood the purpose of the verification system. It’s primary, if not sole purpose was to confirm that if you were following the accounts of prominent people and organisations, then you knew that it really was the thoughts of Boris Johnson, Britney Spears, Greta Thunberg or even Elon himself that you were reading. Now anyone can buy a blue tick, the verification is meaningless.
This discourages people from using Twitter. The celebrities, politicians and influencers, can no longer guarantee an audience, which is their purpose for being on the app. At the same time, many people are on the app to follow and read such content and so there’s less reason for them to have accounts.
Add in a further factor, the ending of easy linking between platforms. In so doing, Elon treated other social media and internet providers as hostile rivals. That’s not really the case. Many people have more than one social media account because those platforms do different things. Twitter and WordPress will never rival each other. In fact, to some extent they need each other. I can use WordPress to develop in depth content which I cannot on twitter but which makes my twitter feed more interesting. I look to twitter however to share and discuss that content more widely.
By cutting the link, Musk took away another reason for people to use his app. My friend Steve Kneale for example came off of Twitter once he no longer was able to easily share his blog, Building Jerusalem. I suspect that he’s had enough time over the years to build up a readership and so is less dependent on social media links anyway. It’s newer bloggers who will make most use of sharing.
So, the bloggers start to stop using Twitter and given that a lot of people on Twitter use the site to quickly search out content, the site becomes less useful to them. The result is that Twitter haemorrhages more users. The fall out from that is that Musk is likely to lose more advertising revenue. It seems that if you think you understand money but don’t really understand people, then you don’t understand money either.
I don’t know whether or not Twitter or X or whatever it’s being called tomorrow will survive. Actually nothing lasts forever, so it will fail or be superseded one day. What I do know is that Musk is failing to make a success of it. The reason is that he’s rushed in to experiment, play with and change Twitter without taking time to understand it, not just the techy side but to understand the people who use it.
Change without understanding is dangerous.
Faithroots 