How's Elon Twitter Doing?
We're almost at the one-year anniversary of Elon Musk taking over Twitter X. How have your predictions about the regime change fared?
I didn't have much familiarity with Elon Musk at the time, but I was willing to give him the benefit of doubt given his successes with Tesla and SpaceX. I think this has borne out for Twitter from a technical perspective, because barring a few minor hiccups, I'm impressed at how reliable of a platform it has remained despite significant reductions in staff. The constant cataclysmic predictions over the last year seem obviously off-base.
I think the conflict of interest issue remains a serious problem. I wrote about the stark difference between Old Twitter's willingness to duke it out with censorious governments, compared to Musk Twitter's policy of acceding to takedown requests. Musk also flip-flopped from initially claiming his devotion to free speech includes the 'elonjet' account,1 only to change his mind afterwards. Musk has maintained a vendetta against Substack ever since they launched the Twitter-like Notes, and Substack links were initially prohibited outright for a few days (Musk claims Substack was "scraping" data or something) but they still don't generate any previews like other URLs.
That elonjet shift illustrates some of Musk's erratic behavior, because his argument for wanting to ban the account claiming that it provides "real-time doxxing", and in support of that argument he posted a video purporting to show a "crazy stalker" who had been following him as a result of elonjet (also claimed he was going to take "legal action" against the guy behind elonjet). He never provided any additional details of who this person was and how exactly elonjet was implicated, and the last update I was able to find was almost a year ago and says the apparent "crazy stalker" in the video was being treated as the victim by police (which of course isn't conclusive).
Because Twitter is now privately-owned, we don't have exact numbers on how well it's doing financially but the few indicators available indicate a significant decline in revenue from advertisers (the overwhelming source of revenue) apparently fleeing the platform. Musk claimed that advertising revenue was down as much as 60%, but it's hard to know how seriously to take that number since he revealed it during his feud with the ADL.
Musk appears to wants to shift away from a reliance on advertisers and towards a user subscription model. People can pay $8/month to get Verified status which (among other things) provides a visibility boost on the algorithm. The old Blue Check system was needlessly cloistered, and the other current Verified benefits are fine, but the pay-to-boost feature has been really annoying, because it more likely than not ends up artificially boosting inane posts no one would otherwise care about. Musk also wants a $1/year subscription to tweet, and claims paid subscriptions are how to prevent spam and bots but there are countless current examples of Verified accounts spamming everyone with t-shirt advertisements or hawking crypto scams.
We don't have exact numbers about "engagement" but as far as I can tell Twitter remains the haven for the journalistic class, despite their grumblings and promises to evacuate to bluesky/threads/mastodon.
I still believe that Musk is an extremely competent leader for engineering projects. His biographies paint him as someone able to wrest impossible results through what appears to be sheer will and stubbornness. His personality does not seem like a good fit for a social media company that has to wrangle conflicting directives from users, advertisers, and governments. It's difficult for me to imagine Twitter entering a new golden age under his watch, so I predict he'll either quit or significantly step back from his responsibilities. I can't imagine how a user paywall would stop the money hemorrhage, and I haven't seen any encouraging signs from him about a commitment to free speech (except Community Notes, which remains the GOAT).
Of course, I'll still use it.
Yes the tweet is still up though it has a Community Note, which remains Twitter's greatest feature, and Musk's deserves credit for not making his own tweets immune.
In talking with a fellow software engineer buddy of mine we came up with the theory that Elon might be better at hardware engineering than software. Since with hardware you can't make as many erratic changes as quickly because of manufacturing lead times. But with software you can deploy a change to production with the click of a button. Inadvisable, but you can. As evidence the notable Tesla fuck ups, like the braking issues, were not issues with the cars themselves but bad software.
The craziest thing about Musk's acquisition of Twitter was that he went noncontingent without any due diligence. The hubris of such an action boggles the mind. Peter Principle in action, I guess...
I started using Twitter a bit but rapidly ate a 24 hour suspension, followed by a lengthly shadow-ban, for flippantly calling the (then) Finnish prime minister a slut after the scandal where she went nightclubbing in loose clothing. The rules are arbitrary and capricious, and there are thousands of CIA and FBI agents embedded in Twitter acting in censorship roles. As such, it hasn't been worth my attention to continue posting there (except to post links to my Substack, ha).
That being said, it might be a blessing in disguise, as focusing on content that short form is I think bad for one mentally and spiritually, and destroys the attention span.