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Happy Birthday Elon Twitter
We're almost at the one-year anniversary of Elon Musk taking over
TwitterX. How have your predictions fared? I'll answer below.Too blackpilled, I thought the change of ownership wouldn't amount to anything tangible, but he is facing some of the pressures I predicted. The ADL led advertiser boycott happened, and though not perfect, he's holding on surprisingly well.
Some things I didn't predict, that stood out over the year:
Community Notes was a great idea, and for all the whining about misinformation from the powers that be, it actually does more to address the issue than anything I've seen from them.
Who would have thunk it, making tweets editable isn't actually rocket science.
Dropping, what was it, 80% of his workforce? Ballsy move, it's simultaneously crazy how well it worked out, and not surprising at all
Cutting off Substack was lame.
Sealing off access without a login was also lame. Reddit followed his steps by shutting off the APIs, and YouTube is trying to block the adblockers. Combined with the previous point it feels like it marks the beginning of the "cyberpunk" era of the internet. Open access is no longer a given.
I don't think the rebranding hurt the company, but I have no idea what was the point of that.
I don't think this is a "Reddit follows where Elon leads" thing, I think they're all reacting to the same root cause. Borrowing suddenly became more expensive than it had been for a decade and a half, during which time a whole bunch of business plans involved loading up on cheap debt and playing with business models and focusing on growth with a vague notion of getting profit margins in the black eventually, and now those have to get replaced by flailing panicky attempts to make businesses profitable soon instead. Spending a bunch of money offering free services for years may just have been what the kids call a "Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon".
He's been wanting to brand his stuff as "X" for decades. It seems pretty stupid to me. But Musk's life story is a series of "everybody told him that trying to do a thing would be stupid, then he did the thing and made billions of dollars from it" chapters, so I'm only like 90% confident here. On the other hand, this isn't a "make Starship from carbon fiber" sort of stupid idea, where you can test it and discover its flaws and pivot to something smarter without much loss; marketing is a lot more fuzzy than engineering.
I agree with this but think that the root cause is different. Specifically, I think that the root cause is generative AI datasets. In order for your massive database of text posts to have value, it can't be easily harvested for free by some random on the internet. This means there's a big incentive for people with these massive platforms to prevent automated scraping, because that prevents them from charging OpenAI/Meta/Microsoft for access to their data.
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