Eeh. It seems like Musk strategy for X (formerly known as Twitter) is to remove and remove any feature that might be used by third parties to drive people away from Twitter. Presumably, I think, he does this so that people will stay on Twitter.
I think, however, that he goes about doing things in ways that are just... wrong? He has a huge userbase still, so why doesn't he do any A-B testing of these features to see if people respond how he is expecting before announcing and implementing these massive changes. I thought this was industry standard.
The impression I get from Musk is that he gets these ideas that he thinks are so great, and he just pushes them through because he's so sure they're going to work out. And then they don't and everyone is like "well of course they wouldn't work, so how did this get implemented in the first place?". I get it that he's a billionaire and all, but maybe he should be relying more on processes than so-called genius.
It also seems to me like instead of making people stay on twitter for longer, he might be pulling people who create content on the platform away from it. And if there's no one creating content on the platform, then users will go away as well. Meta's threads is coming up with a web-version soon, this will definitely put a much higher pressure on Twitter. I don't really use Twitter on mobile a lot, mostly from the web, so I haven't switched to threads for this reason; I wonder how many people are in the same boat.
The fact of the matter is that Elon has a lot of leeway to do whatever he wants with Twitter because people are so invested in it. Depending on when you joined, your entire social media history is on the platform, including followers, goodwill, and for many - instant exposure/attention.
At this point, Elon could redesign Twitter in the style of Hacker News (although, it would be funny to use HN without headlines, would make for a nice April's Fools for sure) and people would still find ways to justify using the platform. In this context, I'm not sure the transition from Twitter to another platform is going to happen that fast, if at all.
Twitter is mostly bots. The next biggest group, about 20-30 percent are people looking for alternative but caught in the network effects. They are slowly bleeding out. The people who create the impression of overall cheer and support to every BS Elon does are a relatively tiny circle of much less than a million people. Sure, a huge crowd for a stadium. Ten stadiums, even. Enough so he can talk to a new person in that group every 5 minutes, non-stop for the rest of his life and never get to know all of them. But nothing for social media.
Maybe he’s deliberately learning/teaching how to change things arbitrarily. He senses the organization would have a lot of trouble making a button red or changing a vendor, he demands it, just to shake all the rust off.
Later when he’s got control, he can supposedly add every feature back. Maybe he’s visualizing his boondoggle as still worth $44 billion any time he chooses to restore the way it was.
Apparently he believes he bought 44 billions of rust. He’s systematically dismantling everything.
Fired all the top management. Then fired most employees. Got rid of most offices. Abandoned employees in many countries without pay. Shut down multiple data centers. Even sold everything not bolted to the ground in offices he uses. Got rid of entire apps like TweetDeck, castrated the API and made it useless (so millions of bot accounts are back with vengeance). Destroyed the moderation system, and the verification system. Nuked the brand and replaced it with a placeholder X. He even tried to remove the ability to link to other networks (Threads content is still shadow banned) and tried to limit users to 10 minutes of normal activity with rate limiting. Now he’s removing Twitter features one by one until nothing is left.
The only thing he added after a year of work is asking people for money for things that were free. That’s the innovation.
Oh and the illegal X sign. That was removed after three days.
This seems like a bad change - if you want to make article cards smaller why not simply move the image to the left of the headline/extract, or get rid of the image entirely? After all the image is often entirely useless (say for instance an article about an abstract concept like finance that uses an illustration of a stock price chart), and most of the information is usually gleaned from the headline.
I think, however, that he goes about doing things in ways that are just... wrong? He has a huge userbase still, so why doesn't he do any A-B testing of these features to see if people respond how he is expecting before announcing and implementing these massive changes. I thought this was industry standard.
The impression I get from Musk is that he gets these ideas that he thinks are so great, and he just pushes them through because he's so sure they're going to work out. And then they don't and everyone is like "well of course they wouldn't work, so how did this get implemented in the first place?". I get it that he's a billionaire and all, but maybe he should be relying more on processes than so-called genius.
It also seems to me like instead of making people stay on twitter for longer, he might be pulling people who create content on the platform away from it. And if there's no one creating content on the platform, then users will go away as well. Meta's threads is coming up with a web-version soon, this will definitely put a much higher pressure on Twitter. I don't really use Twitter on mobile a lot, mostly from the web, so I haven't switched to threads for this reason; I wonder how many people are in the same boat.