The interesting thing about Xitter was the massive reach it offered over other social networks. So many people on there have Xeeted, "I can't believe this site is free!". I think this lead to other effects like news networks spending half their time covering what people are Xeeting instead of actual news. This no doubt made Xitter as possible as it is today.
I have two big questions about the future of Xitter.
1. Corporate media seems to want to destroy Musk, especially since he bought the social network they invested and depended on so heavily. Does this effectively remove Xitter from the center of public discourse? How will this impact Xitter usage?
2. Everything seems to be trending towards, "pay for reach", which makes it look more like all other social networks. While its certainly possible to build a successful business on this model as Facebook, LinkedIn, and other massive social networks have been done, will Xitter deliver other benefits that are more compelling than competing social networks beyond "lots of reach"?
From my point of view Xitter seems to be going in the direction of being another ad company. Reducing reach, hiring a CEO from the ad industry, and adding paywalls for subscriptions, etc. are all signals that tell me to start looking for a different watering hole.
What will be that next watering hole that gives away an absurd amount of reach in exchange for a relatively modest amount of revenue and corporate media coverage?
Could you please please please stop with that it just sounds/reads horrible (and it is also wrong if you talk about the past where people still at least tweeted, and it will also be wrong for the future where people will be Xing on X, if anything, yeah still sounds horrible).
Without pretending the previous Twitter owners were flawless, I do think they had a respect for the "magic" of the site and took care to not damage it too badly. One thing that's been striking about watching Musk talk about Twitter is how...few of his views about what makes the website enjoyable or special are shared by other Twitter veterans. For better or worse Musk is going in a different direction and I think this blog captures one way that's happening.
> Does this effectively remove Xitter from the center of public discourse?
I honestly don't think that Twitter was ever the "center of public discourse". At its peak, it was used by a bit more than 20% of people in the US, far below the likes of Facebook.
There was a streak where it seemed like every other story corporate media (CNN, Foxnews, etc) covered was a Tweet that some prominent person published. That’s what I mean by being at the center of public discourse.
Compare that to Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., which never really achieved that level of press coverage.
I have two big questions about the future of Xitter.
1. Corporate media seems to want to destroy Musk, especially since he bought the social network they invested and depended on so heavily. Does this effectively remove Xitter from the center of public discourse? How will this impact Xitter usage?
2. Everything seems to be trending towards, "pay for reach", which makes it look more like all other social networks. While its certainly possible to build a successful business on this model as Facebook, LinkedIn, and other massive social networks have been done, will Xitter deliver other benefits that are more compelling than competing social networks beyond "lots of reach"?
From my point of view Xitter seems to be going in the direction of being another ad company. Reducing reach, hiring a CEO from the ad industry, and adding paywalls for subscriptions, etc. are all signals that tell me to start looking for a different watering hole.
What will be that next watering hole that gives away an absurd amount of reach in exchange for a relatively modest amount of revenue and corporate media coverage?