Twitter’s time for a Requiem Mass?

Dies iræ, dies illa?

OK, pretentious opening aside, much has been written about Twitter in recent weeks since the King of Mercurial Capriciousness, Elon Musk decided to start gutting a widely used service.

If you don’t use Twitter you might be mystified why people are so worried about it at the moment. But like most things we use a lot, if you use Twitter, its current turmoil is distressing. It does feel like watching the sinking of a much loved ship though as people seek the lifeboats and slowly drift away on the ocean as the mightly leviathan, holed below the water slowly slides below the waves.

I use Twitter a fair bit, and like most people read far more than I write. I mainly use Tweetdeck at home as the ability to put similar minded accounts into lists on one screen massively speeds up how I can read related content.

Tweetdeck has been neglected over the years, but it worked even if half the features on Twitter hadn’t been migrated over. In fact, Twitter almost feels like three separate services, depending on whether you use the website, smartphone or Tweetdeck.

However, it’s such a remarkable place to just keep up with what’s going on in the world – the short messages are more akin to a flow of headlines. Easy and quick to consume without getting bogged down in scrolling past paragraphs of text you don’t care about.

I get snippets of news, politics, London events, museums and people I am interested in.

Twitter is my background hum of awareness.

For that to be seemingly ripped away by the actions of a man who is clearly behaving in a very nasty way is distressing. It’s not that Twitter was perfect, far from it, but to buy a company and sack half the staff could be written off as drastic action. But to sack them in such an unpleasant way, often not even telling them and simply by locking them out of their computer is plain nasty.

I suspect a lot of people across the world watching this are aghast that workers in the USA have so few of what the rest of us consider to be basic employment rights and can be sacked seemingly on a whim without notice.

Elon Musk is plain nasty.

Money, money, money

Of all the decisions, the cack-handed launching of a paid subscription service is going to be a case study of how to do a stupid thing in a stupid way.

A subscription service is not in itself a bad idea, but oh my god, what was he thinking of when designing it?

I would probably have paid, as it offered a website with fewer adverts, and that’s a good incentive to me. But do I need to advertise the fact that I am paying? Of course not. What do I gain by advertising that fact? Nothing. People don’t go around wearing badges announcing that they subscribe to Netflix, so the decision to turn the Blue Tick from an indicator that the account is verified into one that indicated the person pays $8 was so utterly bizarre that it could only be the result of a fever dream.

On a service full of random people typing whatever they wanted, having some level of account verification was a fantastic idea. OK, it could be improved, but as a basic concept, it reassured people that the person is likely to be somewhat legitimate.

The bizarre decision to let any random fool buy a blue tick is going to be a case study at management schools for decades of a damn fool idea with consequences so obvious to anyone thinking about it that it’s incredible that it survived a few minutes in the sunlight let alone being implemented.

Then again, the stupid idea was also stupidly implemented, which limited the damage.

It seems, for some odd reason, that they could only take credit card payments on Apple devices, possibly because Elon Musk sacked the people who could quickly bolt a generic credit card form into a website. The sort of thing that Stripe makes incredibly easy. By the way, Elon Musk is an early investor in Stripe.

But saying that people on the world’s most popular smartphone, or who use the website can’t pay for a blue tick at least limited the damage.

Twitter, like all user generated content services, is dependent on having lots of users but like all such services, there’s the classic rule that just 10% of users create 90% of the content. The vast majority of us consume passively. And that’s just like all forms of entertainment and information, where a few people create that which is read/watched/listened to by the vast majority.

But his idea that content creators would pay to create content is backwards.

If Netflix said that it was scrapping subscriptions and then told actors that they would have to pay to appear in its movies, the world would think Netflix has lost its mind. Yet, that’s the business model that Elon Musk thinks will work on Twitter.

Yes, I get some commercial gain from being on Twitter, but Twitter gains vastly more from content creators being on Twitter that charging them seems perverse.

And if the content creators leave, then what’s left for the vast majority of users to read?

Le Morte D’Twitter

I doubt Twitter will die.

It will go through a bad patch, with a lot of fail whales reappearing because the idiot owner sacked the people who work so hard to prevent that from happening.

He’s said to be looking for someone to run the company and asking people not to quit after threatening to sack them. As a person who famously despises working from home and expects people to work in an office, he’s also closed the offices.

So Twitter is going through a bit of a Liz Truss moment.

Hopefully, it’ll come out of it though, bruised and battered, but hopefully, it’ll survive.

Because I am not entirely sure what could replace it.

Mastodon is the hot topic at the moment, and I have an account there, mainly to stop anyone else from cybersquatting my username, although I don’t really use it because it’s so slow and clunky to use. And no Tweetdeck equivalent. Mastodon is an interesting idea that’s very driven by idealistic principles but fatally flawed by its inherent complexity. They’ve created the Elysian Fields, but did so on a floodplain.

Facebook is a cesspit these days. I have an account for work purposes on there, and apart from being a real pain to use compared to the speed and simplicity of Twitter, it’s just a horrid environment. I’ve come so close in recent months to either closing it entirely or finding some way of making it read only and shutting down the comments. It seems to have got a lot worse in the past year or so as well.

That would be a shame, as engagement on my Facebook page has the sorts of numbers that any social media manager would weep for. But, it also gets a lot of hate on there. I block/ban probably a dozen people a week, and the emotional toil of moderating all the bile is draining me. It also occasionally makes me snappish when replying to people, which I regret, but I am worn out dealing with the hateful comments.

Regardless of political views, some of the language used is vile. And the racism, homophobia, etc. And it’s almost entirely on the railway news stories.

So, no Facebook is not an alternative I can deal with.

I have the technical skills to replicate some of Twitter through RSS feeds and the like for news only, but Twitter is better for the fun and the gossip and puts it all in one place, and despite the problems, its generally really useful and at times, a lot of fun.

It’s a heck of a lot easier, and quicker to use than Facebook. And it’s where important messages are posted. When was the last time you heard the news announce the death of a celebrity and read out messages posted by the celeb’s friends on Facebook? It’s always XXX posted on Twitter about how sad they are. Never, that they posted on Facebook.

Likewise politicians, etc.

For me, it’s my office gossip, the place I dip into in between tasks to catch up on a bit of news, a bit of work info, a bit of random crap. It’s the water cooler we all need in a virtual work from home world. And yes, I’ll miss it if it collapses, because life will seem less connected, less informed.

As odd as it seems considering I am mainly reading the thoughts of people I’ve never met, I’ll be lonely.