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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.
No. Normies are the lifeblood of social media, and any ideologically inflected alternative is going to suffer from the fact that normies aren't going to be interested in switching platforms to hang out with a bunch of fanatical weirdos. Being slightly more reputable that right-wing conspiracy theorists is not enough.
Most people are operating off a vibes-based rather than rigorous definition of social media. "Social media" means the big, talked about platforms - Twitter, FB, Instagram, etc... Not private forums, the comments section of a news site, or a blog.
I'd argue that some people probably think that an outward facing surface is part of what makes traditional social media, the idea that you can tweet out to whoever the retweets take you to or that you can be looked up by randos on facebook. Discord kinda doesn't have that, its all invite based, its mostly not used to send 1 message to a large audience, and you can't really look someone up unless you know their discord ID.
It's still social media in the broad sense but its more like myspaceified IRC than chatroomified twitter.
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