What’s Elon Musk done to Twitter this time? The latest of this billionaire’s bone-headed decisions over the weekend is the gravest threat yet to the social network’s continued relevance.
The first was a move to block people from viewing tweets unless they were logged in. Then Musk implemented a limit on how many posts a user could read. He gave just 600 for the vast majority of users who don’t pay for the service; that was increased to 1000 shortly afterwards. Both decisions were, in Musk’s telling, efforts to fight back against outside organisations that are supposedly scraping (a term for the unauthorised extraction) Twitter data at scale.
But both moves demonstrate either a fundamental misunderstanding of what made Twitter the home of news and discussion on the internet, or a willingness to disregard it.
For more than a decade, the embeddable nature of tweets has made them a building block of information on the internet. Millions of news articles featured tweets from their subjects. Not only did these embedded posts fortify the trustworthiness of the article (there’s no misquoting an embedded tweet) but they also served as an advertisement for the service. Every embedded tweet was a reminder that Twitter was where important people were and where the news happened.
Like every other major social network, the endless amount of content is also crucial to its appeal. Not interested in a post? Keep scrolling and you’ll find something that takes your fancy. It’s also been part of its business model too. The more you read, the more space it can sell to advertisers. Perhaps a limit is better for us (“We are all Twitter addicts and need to go outside,” tweeted a Musk parody account that the real Musk retweeted), but it’s definitely not better for the popularity of the platform in the long run.
Twitter isn’t dead yet, but the proclamations that Twitter is dying — mocked by Musk fans — have turned out to be unfortunately prescient. Twitter use is dropping (although neo-Nazis have flocked back). Its ad sales have plunged. A tiny proportion of users have signed up for its premium service and most of them stopped their subscription. Its competitors are so popular they’ve had to halt new sign-ups. It’s worth just a third of its purchase price from nine months ago, according to a major investor.
Given how badly things have gone, it’s easy to forget that these problems are of Musk’s making. His hubris inspired him to buy the platform and saddle it with debt because he thought he could run it better than the woke, soy-boy laptop class. Time and again Musk has been proved wrong.
Twitter 2.0 would just be the story of another corporate failure if not for the current state of the internet. After the first generation of the world wide web was built on open protocols such as email and web browsing, we were lured into web 2.0’s closed gardens because they were easy to use, powerful and promised a commitment to host and tend to the public square. So we made them our homes and built our lives around them. Now they’re locking the garden gates, we’ve got nowhere to go.
Have you lost patience with Twitter and left for something better? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
