There is nothing more complicated in his decision here. Elon is a visionary and a builder. That's all his ventures.
I don't understand how people view him as a product person. How is he making the product (Twitter) better?
Taking away an existing feature like verification and selling an objectively worse version back to people doesn't make the product better. Strengthening the silo effect by banning talk about competitors doesn't make the product better. Charging $50k / month for business verification doesn't make the product better, especially for businesses users.
I thought Twitter might improve because I believed the rhetoric about Musk being a product person, but I don't believe that any more. All of his moves have been short sighted cash grabs.
Is there a single thing about the (technical) product that's improved since Musk took over?
> pushed the chronological feed
It's funny how many people who did not even know they weren't using a chronological feed before, are now cussing him out for showing a "For You" page - when he just made it much more visible and easier to switch to the "Following" feed.
Super Follows in 2021 https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...
Birdwatch (community notes) in 2021 https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...
all launched before Musk took over.
Also, bookmarks have been there for years. As have subscriptions, and Community Notes.
Twitter as of 2020 was fantastic, and these features added essentially no value to it. On the other hand, the public API is now a mess, twitter circle tweets are being shown to people who were not supposed to see them, I get logged out of all my accounts at least once a week and most notifications have serious delays. I've been using twitter since the whale days back in 2010, and it feels like we lost a decade of SRE progress.
Yes, that's why I wrote "pushed". Before Musk it was hidden behind a stars button. After Musk it became a huge button at the top of your feed.
> Community notes precedes Musk too.
Which is why I wrote "improved".
> Longform text is literally what twitter is not about, and a major turn-off for so many people.
People have circumvented that since the start with screenshots or 15 tweet long threads. It makes a lot of sense to offer the option that a lot of people have been asking for and using through different hacks.
> I've been using twitter since the whale days back in 2010, and it feels like we lost a decade of SRE progress.
I joined in 2008 and my experience is that the development has been nonexistent for 10+ years. Rebranding bookmarks into likes was probably the worst idea. The fact that it doesn't do video well despite being the #1 news source for breaking news surprises me the most.
Let's suppose for a moment none of the objections to these "features" I raise are valid. Why are people not talking about twitter circles being flat out broken? What about the constant changes to the UI which no sane design team would approve - like removing the "RT by @account" text out of nowhere, then putting it back up a few days later. Improvisation and rollbacks to major decisions? Remember when a couple of weeks in they just let people pay to get bluechecks and major advertisers had to deal with verified accounts posing as them? The whole "remove legacy bluecheck" thing?
Twitter was afloat and since 2020Q3, posting profits every quarter, but revenue has crashed as a result of all this. I can't really get why these details like "improved community notes" are more relevant to some people than the blatant mismanagement.
Only use of long form text posts is so you know to block the person without reading them.
He did fix the awful old algorithmic recommendations by just firing the team who were bad at them, but it only worked once; it's not like ad targeting is any better. The new UI is just a slightly different version of forcing you onto the algorithm feed.
Because of the way Elon bought the company it needs to make a shit-ton of money and fast. Elon can't just sidestep that responsibility by vacating the CEO role.
> Last November, General Motors Corp. (NYSE: GM) was among the first companies to announce pausing Twitter ads. Among those that took a similar path were General Mills, Inc. (NYSE: GIS) and Volkswagen AG’s Audi unit.
> Brands such as Mondelez International Inc. (NASDAQ: MDLZ), Coca-Cola Co. (NYSE: KO), Merck & Co Inc. (NYSE: MRK), Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. (NYSE: HLT) and AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) have also not returned to Twitter in terms of advertising as of February, Bloomberg noted.
> Last month, Musk said that Twitter’s revenue had fallen by 50% since October because of a decline in advertising.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitters-revenue-drops-advert...
Don't forget that the company also has to pay $1.5bn a year to service the debt Musk used to buy it.
https://www.marketingbrew.com/stories/2023/04/12/twitter-s-a...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/271337/twitters-advertis....
https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/snap-q4-2022-earnings-...
Do you have a source for this? All I can find is an interview remark from Musk about the company "roughly breaking even," without any actual numbers cited.
Another thing you may not know: Twitter will soon be competing with Youtube.
In the sense my walk through the park today "competed" with Kipchoge because we both propelled ourselves forward on legs, sure.
Twitter video is by far the least functional it's ever been, and this is a relatively recent (past ~month) development.
https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/4/18/23687125/elon-musk-...
It makes sense in terms of how I can imagine Elon's vision. It doesn't (to me) make sense as any kind of realistic proposition.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1657050349608501249
>Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app.
Musk is just steering it one particular way.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...
Be careful, you might be undermining a narrative.
I am not normally a fan of the term "virtue signaling" but I think her involvement with WEF might just fit.
It could be virtue signaling, but in theory following these people could be virtue signaling as well.
Well, "Hack jobs" with living, sentient beings is close enough for me:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/05/neuralink...
> Twitter has fully complied with more than 80% of government and courts’ requests to remove or alter content since Elon Musk bought the company, up from around 50% before he took over, according to a report from the technology publication Rest of World, reflecting a discordance with the billionaire’s promises to limit political censorship.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...
Well, come on, that was true under Dorsey too, he was just criticized for it by the half of the people who are now praising Elon for it.
An LBO. It’s become clear Musk’s employment cuts haven’t brought Armageddon. He’s now installing an advertising executive as CEO, which portends a return to the status quo business model. This is a classic cut-the-fat corporate raid.
Is it clear? I haven't really used Twitter since well before the acquisition, but I've heard nothing but complaints about bugs, ad revenue falling off a cliff and replies being nothing but right-wing reply guys.
> This is a classic cut-the-fat corporate raid.
If this were true, Elon would have cut the actual fat. Instead he (directly and indirectly) destroyed Twitter's relationship with advertisers, which was the only meat in the company. All that's left is fat.
They’re allegedly approaching cash-flow breakeven [1]. Musk is notoriously unreliable with timelines, but he tends to be conservative with purely financial ones. That, assuming this is actual cash flow and not an unlevered metric like Ebitda, signals stability.
I’m not calling it a success. But Twitter is operational. People complained but, largely, haven’t left. The new product initiatives were busts, but quickly withdrawn when the data showed they didn’t work. Stability is on the horizon; it’s not Armageddon.
> Elon would have cut the actual fat. Instead he (directly and indirectly) destroyed Twitter's relationship with advertisers
He did both. He’s now trying to reverse on the latter. Given the financial stability, Yaccarino has a solid foundation from which to do so.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-07/musk-says...
I think it's pretty clear that there was a lot of fat to cut. From a technical perspective Twitter hardly seems to be suffering at all.
The biz move (to pivot to a right-leaning social network) is what scared off users and advertisers, not the layoffs per se. In a counterfactual world where Elon slashed staff but left the existing policies and target demographics in place, Twitter would've been a lot healthier.
Posts and quotes fairly frequently don't load (though QRTs were never reliable) but more importantly they've stopped moderating everything, which is why searching for "cat" has returned animal abuse videos for the last week, and their solution was to turn off autocomplete of search terms.
(i should perhaps disclose that i have a very low opinion of Musk, but don't hate him)
At the moment it's hard to say whether the stream of small bugs (the one that annoys me is that the unread notifications indicator seems to be perenially out of sync) is just normal enshittification, or the foreshocks before The Big One.
This is what I meant. The vision is that of a classic LBO play. Cut the fat. Survive long enough to pay down the debt. Now you own a profitable company.
Now he'll move left again and cash in. Also of course there are considerations like Tesla subsidies and DoD contracts. But perhaps those institutions approved the above plan to restore centrist views.
Their entire platform is geared to be maximum advertiser friendly, aka the status quo.
It really isn't like YouTube doesn't discriminate equally, I'd even say in some cases they do so more strongly towards certain groups that tend to be left wing (e.g. queer people immediately being demonitized when not shrouding words like "biosexual").
Sometimes I watch a rightwing video, and then all I get is more and more extreme rightwing videos suggested.
Then I have to watch some leftwing video to get back to more balanced content :D... but there seems to be plenty of content on both sides, with suggestions leaning heavily on which side you watched the most.
Content that gets an extreme emotional reaction is strictly better at causing engagement, that's just like a basic sociological thing.
The result is that youtube pretty much constantly tries to radicalize everyone. It doesn't care if you get radicalized left or right, it cares that you go into rabbit holes that make you angry or emotional and have a reaction. I watched youtube attempt to do this to me, as I watched a singular video by a more radical than average leftist youtuber, and youtube immediately started recommending me the classic "angry incel right wing" content that so many young men are deeply entrenched in, but I have never been recommended in my 15 year old youtube account. Depending on your beliefs or research I'm not aware of, right wing radicalization might be more effective, as "it's not your fault, we just have to hurt and remove certain people" is more palatable to certain people than "the system is fucked and we have to gut it and work hard to build it back". In that case, it would naturally push right wing radicalization over left wing radicalization.
None of this has to be purposeful. However, willfully ignoring this outcome because it makes you a lot of money is actively evil in my opinion.
That's how money-losing products get designed.