Now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter - now the Pit edition (Part 1)

A variation on the scenario I was expecting – the deal falls apart, and Elon tries to avoid the penalty clause by claiming that Twitter was the one who backed out.

Yeah, I missed a couple of ctegories. Sports, and entertainment.

But my point is that it’s much harder for a competitor to take audience from Facebook because Facebook’s value is largely dependent on your ability to connect with your personal social network - family and friends. It’s hard to leave Facebook for somewhere else unless you can convince all your friends and family to go with you. But they in turn are tied to the platform by their own social networks. This is a really powerful source of ‘lock in’.

Twitter is not like that at all. All it would take would be an agreement by academics, media, artists, etc to go somewhere else, and the audience will follow them. Also, you can split time between twitter and competitors to it without losing the value they may have.

So Twitter is vulnerable to a mass exodus of users in a way that Facebook is not. If Musk pisses off the twitter glitterati, they can leave and take the party with them.

I don’t disagree with that statement. But it does have a function that isn’t really replicated by any of the existing alternatives–at least, not any that are big enough to take on all the users who might leave. So there still is a lot of inertia built in.

There’s a reason why I didn’t even see all the “conservatives” leaving as much of a threat. They didn’t really have anywhere to go that could handle them while giving them the large reach they would want.

And, yes, the Twitter “gliteratti” care more about the reach than anything else. I’d say their biggest use of Twitter is for advertising, whether that advertising is for media properties, websites, or even people. They post there to reach the masses. Most would not be expected to move to another platform and not at least still simulpost on Twitter as well.

Sure. But being able to go to a new site while still using Twitter makes it even easier for Twitter to lose audience: They can continue to use Twitter and cover their bets while an alternative grows. That’s happening today with Gab and Rumble and I suppose Truth Social (I’ve never logged into any of them). I’ll bet almost every person on those services still uses Twitter, at least to read. Alternatives also have an easier time because they can slowly grow their audience.

Youtube has the same problem as Twitter. If a famous Youtuber leaves for a new site, their audience can go there and still use Youtube for other stuff. So alternative services can grow market share slowly and maybe eventually take over the #1 spot from Youtube. This is currently happening with a lot of science communicators who don’t fit Youtube’s stupid algorithms any more which emphasize short videos and viral content. ‘Man gets hit in balls’ is more important to them than ‘Scientist educates public’.

Facebook alternatives, however, have no way to bootstrap, because without your social graph moving with you, another site has no value at all. Facebook’s real risk is that people just stop using it at all. I think that’s already happening. My family feed probably has 10% of the traffic (other than ads) than it had a few years ago. But they aren’t leaving for a Facebook competitor, they’re just bored with it and the novelty has worn off.

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Are you okay?

This is one of those things where the ability to succinctly state something doesn’t make it simple or easy to accomplish. “All it would take to solve this collective action problem would be for everyone to agree to solve it” is true and also extremely difficult to accomplish.

I’m someone who regularly checks twitter throughout the day. I also read other things, but the barrier to me opening some other app to read some people that I follow is fairly high. If people left twitter, those who stayed would reap the gains of extra attention from people like me. Eventually if enough people left, sure, the value to me would go down enough that I might go elsewhere, but that would take a while. The power of habit is strong. How many people still start their web browsing day on yahoo.com or aol.com? Not zero! And those sites haven’t been relevant in decades.

Remember Myspace? That service was closer to Twitter’s model than Facebook’s. It was driven mainly by content creaters, with the vast majority of thr audience being readers and not contributors.

Once the content providers found better services, the audience followed them away.

On the other hand, most people do not like facebook, or Mark Zuckerberg. And yet they remain, because audience lock-in is much stronger there. The value of facebook is in the networks themselves, and entire networks can’t easily pick up and leave.

That’s why Twitter is more fragile. I’m not saying it will fail under Musk. I’m saying that losing audience is easier if they don’t like the product, so he will have to be careful to not piss off the Twitter bigwigs who drive traffic.

Sure, network effect isn’t insurmountable. But Myspace didn’t fail because everyone “agreed” to go to facebook. It failed because it was a worse product.

Elon might make Twitter worse and drive customers away, but that’s a very different thing than people en masse agreeing to go elsewhere because of personal distaste for Elon, or even for their general distaste of Twitter.

I’m not convinced that Twitter’s network effect is significantly different than Facebook’s. All the media, academics, artists, etc. are on Twitter because all their media, academic, musician, etc. colleagues are on Twitter.

My impression is that the heaviest users of Twitter complain the most. But they are powerless to go elsewhere because that’s where all the people they want to interact with are.

Elon Musk is under federal investigation for his activities regarding the Twitter deal, claims Twitter in a court filing:

Article:

Not really. For large creators, typically 80 - 95% of their views come from viewers who are not subscribed to their channel so if they leave, they’re facing at least a four fold drop in their traffic. You can see with creators that get their videos age restricted (which stops YT from recommending the video) that it craters video views.

On top of that, YT is a two sided marketplace. Large creators are businesses with employees and expenses that need to be covered by ad and other revenue to remain profitable. A new video site wouldn’t be able to get the kind of ad rates that would justify the production values of most popular videos.

Sites like Tiktok are winning largely not by attracting over existing YT creators, but by building their own stable of creators that started on that platform.

[Not paywalled MSN repost]

My read is that this is an attempt to get people to quit (which would disproportionately thin out the best talent, since they’d have the easiest time finding other jobs) in order to degrade the value of Twitter, laying the groundwork for an attempt to renegotiate the price or back out without paying the nonperformance penalty. That’s basically what he attempted with his “My God, it’s full of bots!” ploy a couple months ago.

This legitimately only makes sense if Elon’s investors were as committed to destroying Twitter as he is.

Elon wants less “censorship” and more (perfect) algorithmic removal of bots. He also probably wouldn’t mind an increase in profitability. My personal belief is that this is discussions about how to achieve this that Musk didn’t actually want to be public.

This has no way of achieving that. “People quit the company when they heard my plans for it” are not a valid reason to back out of a deal, and he already chickened out of a lawsuit that looked like it would force him to complete the deal.

What Musk wants from this is a platform where the rules of engagement favor him posting as he pleases with no consequences, with stronger consequences for his critics. The removal of moderation guidelines is the obvious overt goal. The less obvious thing will be the addition of stronger real-name requirements to reduce engagement from anonymous people.

When Musk rails about “bots”, he doesn’t care about automated activity. What bothers him is anonymous critics of people in power (such as himself). He hates that anonymous people can roast his dumb tweets without being exposed to harassment, so he conflates these people with “bots” and aims to get rid of them. His approach to doing this will be to force people to share more identifying information so they can be exposed to harassment. This shifts the power balance in his favor, since average people don’t command the same resources to defend themselves from stalking, harassment, vexatious litigation, etc.

This is the reason that he “researched” his estimate of bot counts by sampling his own feed. If one’s goal is to assess the level of automated activity, then that’s a comically inept way to gather that data. But if one is obsessed with silencing his own anonymous critics, then it makes absolutely perfect sense (assuming he’s not simply stupid - which is possible, given what we know about rich-people’s Dunning-Krueger blind spots, but that’s probably not what’s happening here).

Apply the law of parsimony here. Musk is pursuing a financially ruinous deal because he’s a terminally online billionaire who rationalizes lighting cash on fire so that he can continue to feel like the smartest guy in the room. He is absolutely petty & narcissistic enough to do that. (It remains to be seen whether he’s actually rich enough).

My point was that Musk was always going to gut the twitter workforce, neither of our descriptions of his motivation contradict that. So there isn’t necessary to speculate in him wanting to tank the price for whatever reason to explain his downsizing plans.

The dream of every internet entrepreneur is that the computers do everything to make the business go and the only employees are used to make the computers go. And the lower the employee / computer ratio the better.

Musk is hardly original in trying to deliver on that profitability dream.