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(reposting because new thread)
Is Twitter finally dead yet?
Usually, I'd be the last person to ask such a provocative question. I used to be one of the people who rolled their eyes or otherwise ignored sensationalized media stories surrounding Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter, stories which have plagued the news cycle for the better part of almost a year now. It felt like you couldn't go a day or two without an article on the most mundane of things that were only remarkable because of Musk, like him going to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
But I have to - reluctantly - admit, maybe all the media's negative hype had a point.
The latest decision Musk has made is to rebrand Twitter to "X". The URL X.com will automatically redirect Twitter. Twitter is changing its logo from the iconic blue bird into a white "X". Apparently a tweet should now just be called an "X".
The obvious question is: Why? Musk's answer seems to be that he wants to change Twitter into some sort of "super-app" where one can do everything on it, similar to the WeChat app in China. This only raises further questions, like why people couldn't just use other apps, or why it had to be done in this why, or why they couldn't even just go the Meta approach where the company is renamed X (in fact, it's already been "X Corp." for a while) but Twitter gets to still be named Twitter and keep the blue bird logo.
The one thing that everyone in the Musk-Twitter discourse seems to agree on is that Twitter has significant value in its brand. Now, it might not even have that. Who really wants to talk about "'X'-ing on X" when it's far more idiosyncratic to say "tweeting on Twitter", which people have done for the better part of the decade?
But to answer my own question: No, I think it's the wrong approach to look at each change as potentially an outright Twitter-killer. I think the bigger picture should be looked at, and that in the long run, the demise of Twitter will be a death by a thousand paper cuts, where each change isn't quite so negative to kill it entirely, but it keeps Twitter on a downwards and downwards trend. And there's already been several paper cuts - fleeing advertisers, ratelimits, restricted guest browsing, etc.
The question is, does Musk have a plan for a super app? Or is he just flailing around with half-baked ideas trying to turn a profit on his unfortunate purchase, like his ridiculous tweets indicate? I'm not sure at this point.
But if there is a plan, X could well work – better than expected given its network effects, I mean, it's not like people can realistically leave for mastodon or Threads lol. «Everything app» like WeChat with its extensions is tacky; but it needn't be, that's just the worst of Chinese culture, failure of global synchrony and principled execution. Musk just needs to deliver something that makes Twitter's UX of yesterday (well, the day before) obsolete in people's minds. I initially thought he'd build it independently when his bid falls through, but he was not allowed to have it fall through, so here we are.
Twitter (or X now, I guess) is loved, like old reddit was, so people don't want it to change. Unlike old Reddit, it already was changed for the better (editing, longtweets) and can be substantially improved again (Ugh, DM chats). I have many gimmicky ideas but, to begin with, it has godawful search – and that's exactly what Musk's xAI thing can help with (though I suppose Igor Babuschkin wouldn't be too interested in that). For starters, just implement decent embedding search to eat www.perplexity.ai before it gets going. And while you're at it, why not make the whole of Twitter into one retrieval-augmented generative canvas, including outgoing links, a collective exocortex in the style of Roam Research (rip)? And indeed, ride the tiger: allow people to traverse a continuous generative surface, while also making it a tool for discovery of like-minded humans; eat dating apps as well. Tiers of users, different scrolling limits can be seen as a prelude to this compute-intensive paradigm shift.
Of course, the cringier outcome is more probable.
That's backwards though, threads shows how FB's network effects failed to translate to a new product. X is the new product Twitter's trying to transfer users to. Google/Facebook/Apple/MS do have diverse offerings, but that's as much because they execute well as because they're entrenched (and google's failure to execute has led to many of their new social products failing).
Twitter should improve search - but it's weird they haven't taken it yet, geohot mentioned it as something to improve when he interned at twitter but nothing big happened.
Not backwards at all, but it's a bit more complex. Facebook users are just not very interested in Twitter-like offering without Twitter network, they can converse between themselves just fine on Facebook; nor are Twitter users interested in Facebook people who don't have Twitter. Everyone has already self-sorted by preference. The only delta Threads has is the meme about rocket man bad.
This far it's just a new logo (and optional URL) for Twitter, it's not transfering me anywhere and I expect further changes to be built on top of the same network instead of some separate thing.
People burn out quickly under Musk. Geohot burns out quickly even without Musk. I don't expect anything from him, but search will probably be improved within a year.
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