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So it looks like Elon Musk officially owns all of Twitter now, and he's already fired the CEO, CFO, and policy chief. I don't have any strong opinions on this, but does anyone want to stake some predictions?
Musk presents himself as a free speech absolutist, which is encouraging to me, but I'd be concerned about the conflict of interest. I anticipate there will be some accusations of throttling unfavorable opinions about either him or his companies (RIP rogue driverless Tesla videos). I think the tension between unrestricted speech and a quality user experience will continue to be a problem, as I can't identify an obvious solution. Blue checkmarks are making hilariously cataclysmic remarks but I predict Twitter will remain a favored haven for the journalist class.
In the fight between network effects and identity politics, I think identity politics will win the long term victories. We've all seen what happens when "Twitter, but for conservatives" services get launched. When will we see the first "Twitter, but for SJWs" go live? And will that work out any better for them?
I would not predict Twitter's immediate demise, but I did not really anticipate Facebook's abrupt demise. I've used Facebook for years without much complaint, but in the last year or two they've declared war on my adblockers and serve me 10 ads for every status update I see from people I actually care about. This means I no longer routinely use Facebook or any of their products, even though I've been a piece of their captured audience for more than 15 years.
My students report almost no Facebook use, outside of Instagram, and when I ask them about social media they usually say TikTok or YouTube (the latter of which I do not think of as social media at all). Many also use Discord but for some reason don't seem to think of Discord as "social media." If it was publicly traded, I'd probably buy stock in Discord as the next Facebook-like center of online activity. Most of my students have heard of Twitter, and absolutely never use it.
Twitter won't collapse overnight, and I think Musk has better business intuitions than Zuckerberg, but I think history is against him. At some point enough people will quit that the network effects will collapse. The question is whether Musk can spin the company into something more sustainable before that happens.
Yeah this is really weird to me. I quite enjoyed facebook for many years, as it was the only reasonable way I could keep track of people I knew above my Dunbar limit. It was genuinely quite pleasant to get a drip-trickle of new information about people I knew, like oh neat they went to Spain, oh dang that's some insane workplace drama, oh wow they have triplets! And EVERYONE used it, so it worked almost perfectly as an address book of sorts.
The downside for me started maybe about 5 years ago, where instead of seeing my friends' status updates, I was increasingly bombarded with seeing their 'likes' on thoroughly shitty meme pages. It just felt so depersonal all of a sudden. I had to duct tape a variety of browser extensions to get it anywhere near usable but it just got worse. The vibe felt off, maybe it was just the culture war but people felt increasingly nasty and hostile, just shoving outrageous clickbait into everyone's face and saying "LOOK AT THIS SHIT". I truly hated it.
Nowadays it's desperately trying to claw onto attention by pretending it's TikTok, so I just get inundated with videos about pugs acting silly. I keep it around as an archive I guess, and it's still useful as very limited address book. But besides that, it's more or less useless.
Which brings me to the biggest loss of all: events. Oh my god, events. This was the best feature by far. Because everyone had a facebook account, the default assumption was that you will create a page on facebook for all your parties. And jesus fucking christ it cannot be understated how amazing of a feature it was that you could see who was going!!! I admit it, if I was on the fence about a party, I'd trawl through the 'attending' tab to see if any hotties were going. Facebook also let me know what their favorite bands were. I'd show up to the party already equipped with a solid opener.
Those were the days, and there's no comparable replacement for events. RIP.
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