Twitter kills Twitter

I got hooked on Twitter in July 2009. I’ve remained extremely online since then. It was never about the platform itself. It was always about the people — those who I interacted with and those who wrote the third-party clients that made the service usable. That Twitter the service became the success it did was despite Twitter the company, not because of it.

I’ve often wondered if anyone at Twitter used Twitter. Third-party clients innovated and drove improvements. Twitter made changes no one asked for. In 2012, Twitter changed rules around the API, which caused many third-party developers to abandon the platform. By that point, the first-party tooling was good enough (thanks, in part, to the acquisition of a few key third parties). But still, it was a loss for the ecosystem.

Earlier this week, Twitter went further and gave a one-week notice that free API access is ending. This likely means the end for many integrations. It will almost certainly be the death knell for many of the fun and useful bots that make being on Twitter a better experience.

There’s finally no doubt that the person in charge of Twitter actually uses the service and it turns out he’s a fuckwit. The larger services already (I assume) have paid API access. That’s what you do when you’re running a business. So basically, Elon is just killing off the hobbyists. You remember them; they’re the ones who made Twitter Twitter in the first place. If it’s a shakedown for money (and given the debt Twitter is saddled with by its fuckwit-in-chief, that seems likely), I doubt it will be very effective.

That said, I’m not abandoning Twitter yet. There are still too many people that I don’t want to leave behind. But it’s easy to see a gradual decline until we reach a tipping point. Will the last one out please put up the Fail Whale?

Prepare the lifeboats?

When do I leave Twitter? That’s a very good question and I don’t have a very good answer for it. But last night I decided to go ahead and create a Mastodon account just in case. It’s been less than two months since I wrote “Mastodon won’t save us“. I stand by everything I wrote there. But as Elon Musk continues to corncob at an accelerating pace, there may not be a Twitter to cling to much longer.

Where are my people?

Someone on Mastodon objected to my use of the word “lifeboat”. But that’s what it is. I care about Mastodon as a technology exactly as much as I care about Twitter: none cares. The important part is the social aspect. I ran my accounts through the Movetodon tool. Of the 2708 accounts I follow on Twitter, it found 380 Mastodon accounts. I’ve manually added 19 others. Most of them are my tech friends.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my tech friends. But what about the ~2300 others? My timeline gets a lot less interesting if 85% of the people I follow disappear.

Will I use it?

I know myself well enough to know that I crave the interactions of social media. Because I try to associate myself with kind people, my replies are almost universally soothing to my overwhelming sense of insufficiency. So even if Twitter survives, I’ll probably end up active on Mastodon without meaning to be. That’s how I roll.

One thing I’ve already noticed, though, is that I’ve skipped on posting a few things already this morning. I wasn’t sure if I should post to Twitter or Mastodon, so decided not to post at all. I have long believed that cross-posting to various social media sites is anti-social and I have no desire to maintain parallel streams of thought. I guess we’ll have to see how this plays out.

Twitter blew

Last night, Alex Heath reported that Elon Musk wants to raise the price of Twitter Blue and require it for verification. It’s possible that this decision won’t backfire spectacularly, but I have concerns.

Misunderstood feature

At its core, this decision fundamentally misunderstands verification. First, it’s less a benefit for the verified user than it is for the rest of the users. It’s essentially a trust mechanism: this person is who they say they are. Verification means users can more easily determine if something was said by a politician or a clever impersonator.

Of course, misunderstanding verification is not unique to Elon Musk. Twitter has always been a company that doesn’t quite understand its product. Under previous leadership, Twitter has revoked the verified status of users who have repeatedly been bad actors on the platform. This signals that verification is some sort of approval, rather than identification.

No doubt some people will choose to pay the monthly fee in order to retain their blue checkmark. But for a lot of smaller celebrities, local journalists and politicians, and the like, the $20 per month fee doesn’t seem worthwhile. There’s a value mismatch, too: verification is a one-time activity; tying it to a monthly subscription makes no sense. (It will also be interesting to see how large companies handle this. A $20/month fee is rounding error to large companies. Will they see it as worthwhile to set that up in their accounting system or will they require the social media manager to expense it?)

Show me the money

The price increase is another matter. Twitter Blue’s feature set is marginally interesting to me. I’ve given some thought to paying for it in the past at the $5 price point. At $20, it makes absolutely no sense for me. At $20, you’re more expensive than Netflix, Disney+, and several other streaming services. Does Musk think that Twitter Blue offers a Netflix level of value over the free Twitter tier?

Maybe he plans to reach his goal of having half of Twitter’s revenue come from subscriptions by destroying the ad market instead. It’s hard to see this move as anything but “I’m going to stick it to all of those liberal blue check elitists.” Quadrupling the price of a subscription and extorting your most active users is some galaxy brain business shit, I guess.

Who wants to work for this guy?

Heath’s article also says that Musk gave the team until November 7 to deliver this or else they’re fired. There’s nothing like swooping in, making a stupid demand, and tying employment to a tight delivery timeline to chase employees away. Of course, Musk has said he wants to reduce the staff at Twitter, so this might be considered a feature. But the people most likely to leave are the high performers who can easily get a job elsewhere. Seems like those are the folks you’d most want to keep.

There’s also the stories about how Musk brought in Tesla engineers to review code. “Software engineering is software engineering,” supporters say. Bullshit. Talented software engineers can look at unfamiliar code and figure out what it does, yes. But car software and social media sites are not the same. They have different considerations. Any sufficiently old code base has a lot of history that makes seemingly bad choices actually be the best choice, unless you plan on starting over from scratch.

As I was scrolling in the middle of the night because my body is dumb and didn’t want to sleep, I saw a tweet from someone who just got the full self-driving beta for their Tesla. It reminded me of how detached Elon Musk’s timelines are from reality.

Why do I care?

I feel sorry for the people who work at Twitter. Their jobs got a lot more unpleasant on Friday and there’s not much they can do about it. More selfishly, I don’t want Twitter to implode. I’ve been able to make friends over the years with people whose interests barely overlap my own. My network is full of weather, technology, sports, English professors, locals of various pursuits, and other total strangers that I’m lucky to have found. If Twitter collapses, not everyone will run to the same place. Some will move to Mastodon or other Twitter-like services popping up. Others seem to be heading for Instagram. Some will probably just abandon social media all together.

I don’t care if Elon Musk succeeds or not. But I want Twitter to succeed.

Mastodon won’t save us

By the end of this week, Twitter will (maybe?) be owned by Elon Musk. And as much as the past leadership hasn’t understood the site, the future doesn’t understand it even more. Some users are publicly contemplating leaving the site, perhaps much in the same way that people say they’ll move to Canada after an election. In any case, people are talking about Mastodon a lot more than they have in a while.

I’m not convinced that Mastodon is the answer. Social media success isn’t about being technically or morally better; it’s about the network. Almost everyone I’d interact with on Mastodon is already on Twitter. Where’s the incentive to move? I get to maintain two parallel accounts instead? It’s a Catch-22 that helps the big players stay entrenched. Will the average person get mad enough at Twitter to switch to something else? I’m not betting on that.

If people do switch, the decentralized nature of Mastodon is an anti-feature for the average person. There’s no one Mastodon service like there is with Twitter. How does the average person pick an instance? How do small instance maintainers keep going?

In some ways, Mastodon is more like email than Twitter. The federated nature makes moderation and safety more complex. Detecting ban evasion is hard enough on a single server, never mind dozens of servers. Despite its ubiquity, no one loves email and spam continues to be a fact of life.

Centralization is inevitable-ish, at least for a successful service. At which point, we’ve just shifted the problem.

Twitter’s future

So Elon Musk is planning on buying Twitter. I say “planning” here because the deal hasn’t closed. But let’s assume it happens. What will it mean?

Not a Musk fan

I’ll be blunt: Elon Musk is a charlatan who gets a lot more credit than he deserves. I don’t doubt he’s a smart person, but being the richest person on the planet has allowed him to engage in unrestrained buffoonery. Whatever his areas of expertise, they clearly don’t extend to understanding tunnels. The best thing he could do would be to leave Twitter alone, but you don’t spend $44 billion to not play with you new toy.

But free speech!

No. Elon Musk doesn’t believe in free speech. He canceled someone’s Tesla order for saying mean things. “Free speech” arguments are almost never about anything other than “I should be allowed to say what I want without consequences.”

Free speech, as envisioned by absolutists, is only free for those with power. If your free speech is used to harass others into silence, the platform does not promote free speech. I’m fine with letting the Nazis and democracy subverters go off to any of the other Twitter-like sites they’ve set up.

So what next?

The key question is “to the degree they left, will the Nazis and democracy subverters come back to Twitter?” I can’t say. For now, I’m not planning to leave Twitter. If it becomes intolerable, I’ll go. To where? Good question! Mastodon holds no appeal to me for a variety of reasons, but maybe I’ll move there at some point. Maybe I’ll just drop that form of social media from my life.

It seems more likely to me that Musk will discover that running a social media site is less fun than criticizing a social media site and get bored. He does have two other companies to run already. Three if you take The Boring Company seriously. While he certainly could do damage, I hope that it remains the shitty hellsite we’ve come to hate. After all, Twitter has mostly succeeded in spite of itself.

Twitter interactions are not a polling mechanism

Way back in the day, clever Brands tried to conduct Twitter polls by saying “retweet for the first choice and favorite (now like) for the second choice.” This was obviously very prone to bias. The first choice’s fans will spread the poll, so virality favors the first option. But it was also the best choice available, other than linking to an external poll site (which means a much lower interaction rate).

Then Twitter introduced native polls. Now you can post a question with up to four answers. It even makes a nice bar chart of the results. Twitter interactions are not a polling mechanism, so why are you using them?!

The answer lies in the word “interaction”. Social media interactions are a way for Brands to measure the success of their social media efforts. Conducting polls via interactions instead of the native polling mechanism are a cheap way to drive up interactions. It’s a good indication that you’re not interested in the answers. People who want actual answers can use polls.

This concludes today’s episode of “Old man yells at cloud”.

Twitter’s public roadmap: I’ll believe it when I see it

Full disclosure: I own a small number of shares in Twitter.

Trello is a very important tool in my workflow, so I read their blog for tips and news. I started reading a recent post by Leah Rider and everything was fine until I saw this:

As one of the most dialed-in companies to the pulse of the people, Twitter…

I’m sorry, what? Twitter is notoriously bad at knowing what people want, be they users (an edit button and less harassment), developers (the ability to develop apps), or investors (I’d settle for breaking even at this point). Twitter may be where the pulse of the people is expressed, but that doesn’t mean the company has a clue.

The post goes on to say

Through a simple public Trello board, Twitter is redefining their relationship with the developer community and setting a precedent for other platforms.

If Twitter wants to define a relationship with the developer community, they could start by having one. The only reason I maintain a Twitter client is because Twitter drove away the original developer. Twitter’s rise was due in part to the ecosystem of great (and not-so-great) third-party applications. Twitter was a platform that people could build off of.

That’s no longer the case. Many features are not available via the API. Polls and GIF searches are two that come right to mind. It takes more than a public Trello board to have a community. And the Trello board isn’t even impressive. It is publicly visible, but not editable. What’s worse, the last update was almost a month ago. The last activity before that was over two months ago.

So if Twitter is ready to develop a robust third-party app ecosystem again, that’s great. It can only benefit the platform. But you’ll forgive me if I wait to see some evidence before I believe it.

Does anyone at Twitter use Twitter?

Full disclosure: I own a small number of shares of Twitter.

Earlier this month, Twitter announced deals to bring more live content to the platform. Bloomberg will provide an original stream 24/7 and many other sources will generate technology, news, sports, and other content. Which makes me wonder if anyone at Twitter actually uses Twitter.

There’s something to be said for telling your users what they want instead of letting them tell you. It worked well for Apple, and of course there’s the famous Henry Ford quote about a faster horse. But this doesn’t seem like a product vision so much as grasping for something that might turn around the stock price. Twitter is a great place for near real time conversations about breaking news and live events, but is it the place to watch those? I’m not convinced.

It’s worth noting that Snap is working on similar deals for Snapchat. Snap is coming off a disappointing earnings report (its first since going public) that saw a 25% drop in stock price. Snap is facing a lot of pressure from Instagram, which is adding features that look very similar to Snapchat’s with the added bonus of being a Facebook property.

Facebook has been strong in user-generated live content, but they don’t seem to be that interested in pursuing Content. Given the success of Facebook, this is either a glaring oversight or a wise decision that other social networks might want to take a lesson from.

But getting back to Twitter, I recently joined the “Twitter Insiders” community. They asked for feedback on a potential new threading feature last week. It’s basically native tweetstorms. One of the survey questions asked what I’d call such a feature. I said “Medium”.

Twitter doesn’t need read receipts

Not content to leave the potentially user-hostile decisions to Apple, Twitter announced last week that they were adding read receipts (among other features) to direct messages. Annoyingly, this is an opt-out feature. Twitter is once again adding a feature no one wants while ignoring the real problems of abuse on the platform.

I’m no product management expert, but I know there are times when you listen to your users and times when you don’t. “I want this thing” is a good time to not listen to your users. That’s not to say you ignore their wishes entirely, but you can build a product that people like even if they don’t realize that’s what they want at the time. Apple has had a fair amount of success with this approach.

“This thing is a problem” is absolutely something you listen to your users about. Particularly when prominent people end up abandoning the product. While Twitter has given lip service to the harassment problem, it does not appear to have taken any meaningful steps to address it. In fact, the read receipts can bolster harassment.

Before the addition of read receipts, harassers would have to guess if a direct message was read or not. With read receipts on, there’s the immediate satisfaction of knowing your message got through. Even setting harassment aside, read receipts just reinforce the cultural demand for immediacy. I’m fairly connected digitally, but I don’t see a benefit to read receipts. I’ll probably respond to a message quickly, but if I don’t then that’s my decision. I don’t need the platform insinuating that I’m ignoring someone when I’m really just trying to keep my children from tearing the house apart.

Instructions for disabling read receipts came out almost as quickly as the announcement.

Full disclosure: I own a small number of Twitter shares.

Twitter’s abuse problem

I’ve been an avid Twitter user for years. I’ve developed great friendships, made professional connections, learned, laughed, and generally had a good time. Of course, I also happen to be a relatively-anonymous white male, which means my direct exposure to abuse is fairly limited. I can’t say the same for some of my friends. Last week’s BuzzFeed article calling Twitter “a honeypot for assholes” didn’t seem all that shocking to me.

Twitter, of course, denied it in the most “that article is totally wrong, but we won’t tell you why because it’s actually spot on” way possible:

In response to today’s BuzzFeed story on safety, we were contacted just last night for comment and obviously had not seen any part of the story until we read it today. We feel there are inaccuracies in the details and unfair portrayals but rather than go back and forth with BuzzFeed, we are going to continue our work on making Twitter a safer place. There is a lot of work to do but please know we are committed, focused, and will have updates to share soon.

To it’s credit, Twitter has publicly admitted that it’s solution to harassment is woefully inadequate. It’s in a tough spot: balancing free expression and harassment prevention is not an easy task. Some have suggested the increased rollout of Verified status would help, but that’s harmful to some the people best served by anonymous free expression. I get that Twitter does not want to be in the business of moderating speech.

It’s important to distinguish speech, though, so I’m going to invent a word. There’s offensive speech and then there’s assaultive speech. Offensive speech might offend people or it might offend governments. Great social reform and obnoxious threadshitting both fall into this category. This is the free speech that we all argue for. Assaultive speech is less justifiable. It’s not merely being insulting, but it’s the aggressive attempt to squash someone’s participation.

I like to think of it as the difference between letting a person speak and forcing the audience to listen. I could write “Jack Dorsey sucks” on this blog every day and while it would be offensive, it is (and should be) protected. Even posting that on Twitter would fall into this category. If instead I tweeted “@jack you suck” every day, that’s still offensive but now it’s assaultive, too.

This, of course, is a in the context of a comany deciding what it will and won’t allow on its platform, not in the context of what should be legally permissible. And don’t mistake my position for “you can never say something mean to someone.” It’s more along the lines of “you can’t force someone to listen to you say mean things.” Blocks and mutes are woefully ineffective, especially against targeted attacks. It’s trivially easy to create a new Twitter account (and I have made several on a lark just because I could). But if the legal system can have Anti-SLAPP laws to prevent censorship-by-lawsuit, Twitter should be able to come up with a system of Anti-STAPP rules.

One suggestion I heard (I believe it was on a recent episode of “This Week in Tech”, but I don’t recall for sure) was the idea of a “jury of peers.” Instead of having Twitter staff review all of the harassment, spam, etc. complains, select some number of users to give it a first pass. Even if just a few hundred active accounts a day are selected for “jury duty”, this gives a scalable mechanism for actually looking at complaints and encouraging community norms.

Maybe this is a terrible idea, it’s clear that Twitter needs to do something effective if it wants to continue to attract (and retain!) users.

Full disclosure: I own a small number of shares of Twitter stock. It’s not going well for me.