I thought that Twitter would last forever

[dsrtao]

I did not consciously consider that all corporations have life cycles, and software-service companies tend to be shorter-lived than most. I just assumed that Twitter would be around forever.

But something smelled about it. No business plan for profitability, high feature churn, deliberate anti-features in line with random-reward reinforcement. I created an account solely to see how much spam it was going to get, and whether the password would eventually be leaked. I didn't use the account at all. I didn't use Twitter, by their standards: when someone elsewhere said i should go look at somethng on Twitter, I didn't log in, I didn't use an application. I fired up a web browser and went to look. No posting, no replying, no retweeting (what a ridiculous and insidious mechanism!) and no following of anything or anyone. This is not a bad experience, as it turns out, but not a compelling one, either. The evidence from that suggests things that anyone who has thought about these things from a user's perspective could tell you: a user wants to see posts from the people they specifically signed up to follow, all the posts, in chronological order, with easy searching which can be limited to a particular poster. People like subcommunities where they can choose to read all the posts from the people also in those subcommunities. Hashtags are a terrible implementation of this, because humans are not good at tagging. Threading (in the original Usenet sense) is highly valuable. Personal kill filters are necessary. And on, and on -- it seems like every social media experiment is doomed to rediscover these things.

Once I found a Twitter stream that I thought I would be actually interested in long-term, so I found a way to get an RSS feed from it. Turns out that if you're not involved in Twitter, reading disconnected tweets is not a good experience.

I wonder if being involved in Twitter would actually improve that. I suspect not.

So. Twitter. In an impossible imaginary universe where a CEO can know everything about all of their employees and can effortlessly pick out the lesser performers , it is still highly unlikely that a 50% layoff results in the company surviving. At a minimum, a working company needs to be able to talk to and pay suppliers, do accounting and payroll, operate the service, acquire money, and operate infrastructure. No matter how much Twitter automated, they must have lost enough institutional knowledge that wasn't automated (or was automated but no longer has knowledgeable people to maintain it) to fatally wound the corporation as a business.

And, of course, the CEO is famously unfamiliar with primate psychology. When an outsider comes in and kills all the senior leadership, then kills 50% of the troops, what do you think the survivors are going to do? The basic reactions:
 

• hide at the edges
• tell the outsider comforting lies
• gather a few friends by eye and leave

Oh, and thanks to the privatization, nobody at Twitter except the new CEO has any stock left in the company. There is no magic lottery ticket for any of them. Hopping to a job elsewhere is now the most sensible thing any of them can do -- the people who are still technically employed are all estimating how long they should wait for the market to absorb the current flood of laid-off folks so that the competition is not so fierce.

Twitter is dead; the zombie corpse will keep moving for about a year.

 

Comments

[graydon]

The one upside is that it might taint the notion of "id amplifier" as an internet business model.

I am not especially hopeful; too many other people are trying, and too few people realize that's what the business model was.

[cvirtue]

The corpse could be colonized by some kind of opportunistic capitalist infection and remain apparently animate longer than the year....

[dsrtao]

ISTR that SCO (formerly the makers of SCO UNIX) are in that position now.

[jducoeur]

I mean, officially that's the point. Musk has made fairly clear that he wants Twitter to become the heart of a new Chinese-style "everything app", that people basically run their lives on. That's hyper-capitalism at its finest.

Is that realistically plausible? I doubt it -- it's within the realm of possibility, given Musk's history of building empires out of implausible plans, but everything I've seen indicates that this time he genuinely has no idea what he's doing. And while building such an app isn't crazy, spending $44B to burn Twitter to the ground and use it as the shell for such a thing is... not good business logic. It's fairly likely that he's salted the earth enough to make it impossible, even if it could have been done before he screwed it up so badly.

(And in the meantime, I'm more than happy about having been driven over to Mastodon, which is a vastly more pleasant and interesting place to hang out.)

[cvirtue]

*Wanting* to be like the Chinese social media landscape, supported by, and with forced behavioral controls, from the government, does not seem like a viable American business model.

But what do I know? I’m no kind of expert; I’ve only read a few articles about the stuff China does to its citizens and its citizens-non-grata.

[jducoeur]

While that's true, AFAICT it's a bit of a non-sequitur: the super-apps largely emerged before the crackdowns got really serious in recent years. If anything, the Chinese government has recently been hamstringing them to some degree, probably because of fears that the companies were getting too big for their britches. (No competition -- even remotely possible competition -- to the state is permitted in Xi Jinping's China.)

I don't know them well, but it looks like those apps succeeded mainly by doing a good job covering a wide number of bases that, in the US, are all handled by separate applications. It's not hard to see why that could work -- the modern Internet has demonstrated that most people are willing to give up a lot of privacy and control in the name of convenience, and having everything from Twitter to PayPal to Amazon to DoorDash in a single app is very convenient.

No government coercion required, just a populace who are willing to accept a Big Brother. I'm not sure that it would necessarily be all that different here, at least for the majority.

[cellio]

Yeah, I can't imagine that most of Twitter's remaining employees will stay any longer than it takes them to find new gigs elsewhere. No stock options, out-of-touch management, demands for miracles, toxic culture... why would you stay if you could go elsewhere? Twitter going forward will be run by people who couldn't go elsewhere. It will take a long time for this to become apparent, but I don't see how they can recover from this.

[squirrelitude]

Dan Lu has some thoughts on the kind of difficulties Twitter is going to have in the coming days, weeks, and months:

https://mastodon.social/@danluu/109310899548757516

He has pretty deep insider knowledge of the company, and thinks that this level of technical damage is survivable even if it does mean degraded service. Or more precisely, he thinks it's more likely to collapse for business reasons before technical ones.