Elon Musk takes over Twitter

I've been knocking this idea around in my brain and I think it's the key to fixing Twitter.

Twitter faces several interrelated challenges:
- Identifying spam, scams, and bots
- Improving the quality of discourse
- Reducing the visibility of low-value accounts
- Fixing incentives to be toxic, namely virality chasing
- Minimizing Twitter's role in censorship, either express (bans) or implicit (downranking visibility)
- Encouraging people to adopt "self help" tools that seem underused currently

Twitter can address all of these problems at once with one change. Today, a user's profile shows the number of followers. This leads to my solution: Next to that number, Twitter should show the number of people who have blocked or muted the account - negative followers. But that change would come with one important limitation: While the identities of regular followers should remain public, the identity of negative followers should not.

Here are the advantages to my idea:
- It would be easy and cheap to implement. The back-end functionality for negative followers (blocking and muting) is already in place.
- The number of negative followers sends a social signal that an account is toxic and divisive. I won't name names, but you can easily imagine who would likely be affected.
- It's a counterweight to virality chasing. People work to inflate their follower count, which is the primary source of influence on Twitter. Right now, that influence only runs one way: One can rack up followers through toxic behavior, largely without consequence. Publicizing the number of negative followers would encourage people to not be assholes. Incentives would change - people would need to maximize followers AND minimize negative followers, which would create a better experience.
- Blocking or muting would no longer be a costless virtue signal. It would be more credible because it gives the audience some skin in the game - the account wouldn't be visible anymore. Even if you hate the New York Times, do you hate it enough to take the drastic step of making it invisible? And you could make it even more costly - adding an extra click to introduce friction, or make block/mute decisions irrevocable for, say, 30 days. Hiding the public identities of negative followers will also reduce virtue signaling.
- Showing negative follower counts would be far superior to downvoting specific posts, something users have long asked for (and which was implemented in beta recently). Downvoting is a costless virtue signal that introduces pervasive negativity to the platform at the most granular level.
- At the same time, showing the negative follower count gives users some measure of a collective voice. It serves the same function as a downvote.
- The ratio of followers to negative followers is valuable information for users, especially newer/less sophisticated users. A low ratio helps identify divisive accounts, while an extremely low ratio should help identify troll/spam/scam accounts.
- This ratio can help reduce Twitter's operational costs on content moderation and its politically divisive role as the judge of social value.
- People don't block or mute enough today. They should do it more. Publicizing the number of negative followers would encourage users to employ "self help" tools that already exist.

Potential pitfalls I thought of:
- Bots and coordinated DDOS campaigns will exploit negative following to harm the reputation of targets. But Twitter already has work underway to address bots, and these efforts, if successful, would mitigate the risk of abuse by bad actors.
- Negative following may increase polarization. Twitter can address this by making blocking/muting more costly. Hiding the identities of negative followers will also help prevent virtue signaling in the service of polarization.
- Newer users may face a higher barrier to becoming influential. But that concern does not seem persuasive to the extent one must be an asshole to be influential.
- Twitter might choose not to publicize negative followers for those who pay (whether superusers or advertisers). Twitter should resist the temptation to grab the cash and instead focusing on improving long-term platform value.

All that said, I haven't seen any real evidence that Elon is legitimately attempting to honestly improve the system, or a willingness to listen to apolitical input on how to do so. I still can't tell if he bought it as just a toy to shitpost, because he wanted to tear it apart, or if it's sheer incompetence (or some combination thereof).

 

If these are indeed the challenges as you see them, Twitter is fucked. Elon has no interest in even addressing the bolded because he doesn't see them as issues.

 

4chan for only 8 dollars a month finally more engagement and clout for my rule 34 cartoons cartel videos and streamers getting rekt by the n word

 

My suspicion is that Twitter will eventually become MySpace or Livejournal. Or Sports Illustrated. Meaning, at some point, Musk is either going to thoroughly tank its value even more because of something he says or does, or, his whole empire goes into insolvency. At that point, some Maven-like entity buys it for pennies on the dollar, simply for the name, or for whatever "interesting" data they can scrape.

As Ragu has pointed out many a times, most of Musk's wealth now comes from the (probably inflated) value of Tesla stock. That's the most promising of his companies to me, but it's having to "carry" a lot of weight at this point, between the debt service on Twitter, and the weirdo experiments of the solar panel and space companies. (By the way, the solar panels are apparently pretty good, but much like Tesla cars, I suspect competitors will catch up because there isn't just one company head that can advocate and push for advancements, like in a normal company.)

The comical thing to me is that, uh, Twitter was kind of fine before Musk! Yeah, it had problems with content and moderation, but so does everything on the Internet. They lost a billion dollars in 2020, but made a billion-four in 2019. I never for the feeling they were some business desperate to sell, but when some idiot offers you $44 billion, well, I suppose you have to take it.

 

It will be interesting to see what happens when one of the alternatives to Twitter take off. Mastadon doesn't seem to be it, but out of Hive, Post, BlueSky and whatever else pops up, I suspect there will be one that does to Twitter what Facebook did to MySpace.

 

I'm still mourning over losing my ability to create a custom background for my page and add an autoplay song to it.

God, that was obnoxious.

 

There’s not going to be another Twitter. Everything that is just trying to replicate it won’t work. When things take off, it’s because they provide something different. Facebook was a better, more interactive, and cooler MySpace. Twitter took the one feature that everyone started with on FB — the status update — and made that the entire site. Simple. Instagram took the pictures part of FB and built a site around that. TikTok is a different product than all of them.

I doubt Twitter will burn itself to the ground. And people who rely on it will not find the same success moving to other new platforms.

 

Twitter isn't going anywhere

 

Musk wants to eat Trump's site, and bring all back to his one fold which unfortunately had already burned less bright. And Trump's site never skyrocket as anticipated. It's why he's allowing, and advertising, these toxic personalities back.

 

Nice job, Elon!