An interesting take on Twitter, unrolled

[Laura PourMeADrink]

https://balloon-juice.com/2022/11/03/late-night-open-thread-but-seriously-financing-elons-ego/

Prof Paul Bernal
@PaulbernalUK

Anyway, my tuppence worth on Musk and Twitter. He’s in for a rocky ride, and the question for me is whether his ego is going to make him destroy Twitter. Right now, what’s pretty clear is that he doesn’t understand what makes Twitter work. 1/10
2:58 AM · Nov 1, 2022

There are three things he doesn’t seem to grasp. Firstly, he seems to think he’s bought a tech company (‘not enough coders, too many managers’) when what he’s really bought is a community of users. 2/10

What makes Twitter work, what makes it potentially valuable, isn’t the tech (which isn’t that special) but the community that uses it – that, in particular, it’s become the medium of choice of journalists and politicians. 3/10

That’s the value, right there. Every journalist worth their salt uses Twitter – and most use it a lot. Ditto pretty much every politician. They’re the user base he should care about, not the right-wing-nut-job community. But he doesn’t even understand *them* 4/10

Right-wing-nut-jobs don’t just want a place where they can rant, abuse and say whatever words they want. If they did, they’d be quite content with Gab, Parler, Truth Social, some bits of 4Chan, Reddit etc. See, they’ve got plenty of spaces. 5/10

No, what they want is a place where they can rant *at the libs*, at the MSM, at the people they hate. If those people aren’t there (and they aren’t on Gab, Parler, Truth Social etc), the ranting isn’t nearly as fun. So if Musk manages to drive the libs away, that’s ruined. 6/10

If the libs are driven off, the right-wing will be jubilant for a while, but then bored. And then Twitter dies. So Musk has to keep the libs on board. Oh, and the advertisers too, because they’ll run like hell if Twitter’s just a hate-speech hell-site. 7/10

And that means moderation. It means keeping the Nazis off the site. It means keeping control of abuse and hate speech. It means cutting down the misinformation. All things Musk doesn’t want to do. If he turns Twitter into a hell-site, he kills it. 8/10.

So what can he do? It’s not easy. There’s no simple solution, no magic wand. Free speech is bloody difficult. I’d suggest he read Habermas, but of course he won’t. So it’ll be messy, and I suspect he’ll just get bored eventually, but who knows? 9/10

That’s the thing. Handing over Twitter to a massive-ego, massive-wealth, unpredictable billionaire is kind of a metaphor for the whole way we’ve dealt with the internet. It’s a mess. We just have to do what we can. 10/10

[dweller]

1. Welp ...

Sounds doomed
😑




✌🏻

[Laura PourMeADrink]

2. Another good thread on financing of the deal

Link to tweet

?t=nYrhBPY0P-GscoOjuwmvzQ&s=19

[ZonkerHarris]

6. great thread. thanks for posting it

[sop]

3. We'll see if Twitter remains "the medium of choice of journalists and politicians" when it becomes

a hell-site. I'm guessing it will.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

5. Yes. It took years to build though. Unless there's one

Platform everyone switches to, people will hang in there.

[Johonny]

17. The next generation of social media is already here

Places like Tik-tok and Twitch are real threats to Facebook and Twitter. They're newer with more modern AI built in and appeal to the younger generation marketers love.

Musk is gambling on turning Twitter into WeChat. That's a big long term goal which may not pan out. Note, a lot of Musk big ideas don't pan out.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

18. Personally,I think there is a level of gravitas that Twitter has

That no others do. It's the closest thing to a source for official information we have. From POTUS to CDC to DOJ to New York Times. It is the place where representatives of these organizations and thousands more make official statements. There may be plenty of more modern architectures out there...but this user universe took years to build. It would take years to dismantle.

[Emrys]

19. Yes. I can't see any sense in which TikTok and Twitch are threats to Twitter.

They cater for different user bases doing different things, with a few overlaps in fields like video sharing. And one of the things Twitter's good at is acting as a "shop window" for other sites' content, paid for or free.

The only realistic threat to Twitter is Elon Musk.

[ZonkerHarris]

4. Twitter is the new MySpace but Musk doesn't realize it yet.

[bucolic_frolic]

7. Articles like that should be suppressed

Don't want to clue in Musk about what his company does or how it operates

[CaptainTruth]

8. "I alone can fix it"

When I think of Musk & Twitter I think of that Trump quote.

Musk's ego is so big he thinks he can do anything, like turn Twitter into some sort of idyllic "digital town square" by sprinkling Magic Musk Sauce on it, but of course he can't.

I have a feeling he's about to learn that the hard (& expensive) way.

[Beetwasher.]

9. He'll Just Slash and Burn it, Gut it, Sell off Any Assets, Declare it Bankrupt then Run

and leave the banks and public with the bill and ruin all the employees lives.

[SergeStorms]

10. Of course he knows all this....

he's the smartest man in the world. He's playing four-dimensional Chess and the rest of the world is still looking for the Checkers board.

[Esra Star]

11. Thank you for your work here Laura PMAD.

You have shaped your arguments well. Love your full stops. I hope Mr Musk reads your post.

[Esra Star]

13. I just realised it may have been a re-post.... so, thank you for that. Cheers. nt

[Emrys]

12. Spot on, with one quibble:

Firstly, he seems to think he’s bought a tech company (‘not enough coders, too many managers’) when what he’s really bought is a community of users.

Maybe stating the obvious, but in his arrogance and ignorance, Musk may think he's "bought" those communities, but he hasn't. From the way he's been throwing his weight around with the threats of mass firings and trying to publicly "cut deals" for how much blue-tickers might be willing to pay for something that shouldn't be for sale in the first place and has more value to other people than to the blue-tickers themselves, he seems to be under illusion that he's done so.

He's bought the platform on which people like that and those who read and propagate what they produce have chosen to operate. For now, at least. That's all. If he can't grasp the value of that to him and his company, then he's headed for disaster even quicker than most assume.

What's largely behind any monetary value sites like Twitter have is the facility for data mining anyway. If his back-end firings compromise that, he's onto an even bigger loser.

[Duppers]

14. Indeed!

[Laura PourMeADrink]

15. True. And he is nothing like most people who run

huge successful companies. He jumped so quickly. When it is much more prudent to take the time up front to thoroughly understand what was bought. In no world does it pay to antagonize and show you cards as he has. A simple "welcome" would have been a million times more effective.

[Emrys]

16. He's styled himself as a whirlwind, when what most Twitter users want right now is reassurance.

His impulsiveness cornered him into a deal he didn't really want and couldn't afford, and I suspect the humdrum business of running a social media site - which mostly means gradual improvements, smooth running and as little distractive disruption as possible - isn't something that's going to interest him for long. Meanwhile, the money hounds are going to be howling at his door.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

20. Good points! Yes, he entered into a seller- friendly agreement

from the git go. And he didn't even have enough self control to abide by the "do not trash Twitter" requirement.

All that said, I hope against hope he gets his act together. Sure do wish he had stockholders to straighten him out.