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Twitter dies for good in the next six months: 80% probability
By now you know that Elon gave staff a deadline of today (Thursday) to either commit to being "extremely hardcore" or leave (source). Unsurprisingly, most people - roughly 75%, according to some Internet rando - didn't take him up on this. Elon blinked and apparently people still have access.
That won't do much (WaPo):
But that's not even what I was going to write about, just what happened while I was composing the post. (Also let's put aside that he said "microservices are bloat" and then they killed the microservice serving SMS 2-factor login.)
To me, the biggest news is that he axed 80% of the 5500 contractors (source, Casey Newton, or someone with a premium account impersonating him I guess).
The contractors were responsible for things like moderation (source: what are they gonna do, use salaried employees?). If you don't have moderation for basic things like CSAM, you're boned. I know a thing or two about moderation, and if you let the Internet type into a text field, you get some dank shit. And crucially, you can't automate it away, because there's a human on the other side working to defeat whatever you're doing. I mean, the YouTube comment section probably has some of the most expensive automation on the planet working on it and the spam still gets worse every day, and I'm talking the obvious stuff like "HIT ME UP ON TELEGRAM <number>". The only thing that saves you is humans clicking buttons (and getting PTSD, but let's skip that for now). Google had 101k employees but 121k contractors as of March 2019, and that's what the contractors do, click buttons.
If you don't have moderation, you don't get the YouTube comments section, because they at least have contractors backed up by code (at the cost of many expensive engineer-years). You don't even get 4chan, because they at least have Those Who Do It For Free. You get some ungodly shithole most younger Internet users have never experienced. You're getting... the virtual equivalent of your local Greyhound terminal. Whatever happens to someone's chat room side project that gets posted to /b/. Sludge.
Twitter will have to either restrict posting to an unbearable degree or watch as the remaining users get tired of slurs in their replies and bounce.
Remember when Elon was just going to clean up the bots on Twitter?
(Reason for posting: I saw some takes elsewhere on this site that apparently Musk would lead Twitter to success or at least improve it or something, and disagreed.)
Musks is the luckiest guy in the world. Heavily benefited from esg etc to give silly valuations to Tesla and can access that cash.
The asshole boss thing actually works when done well. I’ve had them who do nothing. But put pressure on you to figure something out. Actually works to motivate people to do good work.
He’s a winner. He’s always figured things out. While Tesla may be overvalued he’s still made it profitable. Rocket inventiveness was dead before he came along.
He has loyal engineers in Tesla and SpaceX he can use in the situation of mass quitting.
Rockets are not that profitable. He found starlink and what cheap rockets can do for that industry. You just have to trust he will find a profitable business model. Telecommunications are super profitable.
He’s been too red tribe with some bad tweets but a bare bones mode isn’t going to lose red tribe
Social networks are sticky. People won’t want to give up their networks. So even if you lose half people are still going to maintain their other half on twitter for a while
If it seems like twitter is failing then he can buy the debt for Pennie’s on the dollar to maintain control. Then rebuild.
So worst case is he takes the loss on current equity and buys the debt for 3-6 billion. Then rebuilds on red tribe twitter. But that’s worst case. I think stickiness is fairly high in social media so blue tribe probably doesn’t leave.
Yeah, people are underestimating this. There's a lot more that goes on Twitter besides political shit-posting. Lots of people have built careers and small fortunes on the backs of their Twitter followings. I was just listening to a podcast about "threadbois" who did just that. Are they going to turn their backs on their 100k followers they've spent years building just because Elon isn't praying to the right gods?
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What can he get sued for? Losing money and making a bad investment isn’t illegal.
On going funding is an issue but I’m going to make an assumption at a minimum he can figure out cash flow positive.
But say it’s not super profitable but he wants to maintain control he can lose face with his investors and buy the bank debt cheap. So he would have to put like 6 billion in on the bank debt. For relationship reasons throw the Saudis and Ellison etc some options around a 15 billion valuation.
It’s already a zero. Current financing has 1.4 billion a year in interest costs. There investments are worthless unless he does big things which mitigates the he blew it up.
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Twitter is already a low-moat product, network effects are what keep competitors from replacing it. If the left can come up with a left-wing version of Gab/Truth Social/whatever and actually get people to use it (unlike the right-wing examples I just gave) then Twitter might be in trouble. Otherwise I think it's going to stick around.
It's probably worth noting that most of them have attempted to migrate to literally that exact thing (various Mastodon instances). I don't think they'll be particularly successful for the same reason that Gab/TS/etc. haven't been successful: there's simply no value-add in reactionary construction. They don't do anything better than Twitter does anyway.
Which is the same problem this place has, but even worse, since at least you can find this place with a Google search- you can't even do that with Mastodon instances at all. Lefty Mastodon even has the purity spiral thing built in because of how vulnerable users are to admin catfights and a de facto globally-enforced blocklist, where Twitter curbed most of the excesses of that approach- so people can't expect the stability they need to build anything good on top.
The future is not federation, it's confederation, and by its inherently freeing nature it thus can neither come from Left nor Right.
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