When the world’s richest man closed on his acquisition of Twitter last week, signs were already pointing toward a business-oriented version of Musk, rather than a double-edged sword focused on “free speech.” Musk may have initially wanted to buy Twitter as a combination of a joke and a plan to tip the scales of public discourse to the right, or at least the center-right. But by the time Twitter had given up its expensive but weak legal efforts to get the nuclear deal out of the way and gotten him to agree to buy the company for $44 billion, Musk was speaking as someone more focused on protecting the investment. his rather than making Twitter a “free”. -for-all hellscape” (his words) where content moderation went to die. He was assuring his bankers, his Tesla shareholders and Twitter advertisers that he would be a serious steward of the platform. It’s been scanning for a while that Musk would still make some moves that worsen the Twitter experience for most people, and it looks like that’s already happening on the moderation front. But this is happening for reasons of business difficulty, not ideology. And that’s why Twitter could still catch fire, even if not in the way many have feared.
If Twitter rapidly becomes an unusable platform, it won’t be because Musk decided that praising the internet’s most annoying neo-Nazis was worth a huge investment. Instead, if it does, it will be because Musk finds himself in a position where he has to find ways for Twitter to start making a lot of money. This isn’t a historic specialty of Twitter, and to change that, Musk is exploring — or perhaps announcing? – changes that would make the platform a very different place. They probably wouldn’t make it a better one, because the changes Musk is exploring seem to be zero-sum between Twitter and its users. Instead of making Twitter a more desirable corner of the internet, Musk wants to pull more money from existing users by threatening to screw up the platform for non-payers. He uses mostly sticks, with a side of little carrots that might not even be carrots. If Musk wants Twitter to start printing money, he’s in trouble. There’s a reason the company’s old board of directors was so eager to offload the company to him. But if he’s going to have any chance of making Twitter more profitable, he needs to start by making it a better place to spend time. What he has discovered so far does not.
An initial idea, as reported by the Verge, was that Musk’s new version of Twitter would pay $20 a month in exchange for account verification and remove blue ticks from anyone who didn’t pay. To some extent, it is a neat and fair business idea. Blue check accounts are often the ones that rely on Twitter to share their work or engage with their audience and customers. Deducting a few dollars from these users in exchange for prestige and brand recognition is a fair idea. Except the plan fundamentally misunderstands what Twitter it’s and why it verifies accounts in the first place. The check mark has truly become an indicator of high school status tone of accounts, but it’s also a tool aimed at making Twitter a more reliable supplier of information. The check mark makes Twitter an easier environment for processing and trusting news, and to the extent that Twitter wants people to come to it for new information, that matters a lot. If everyone can buy that token of authenticity, it stops giving at all. It’s not hard to think of various ways in which this could become a misinformation problem that makes Twitter a less attractive place to get news. AND bug advertisers who don’t want to be associated with a pit of chaos. It also misunderstands the power dynamic between Twitter and its media and celebrity users, whose content drives thousands of people to the platform. They already tweet for free. What if some of them decide they won’t i pay to tweet for free, and then conclude that Twitter is no longer a welcoming environment to share their work? Especially if the mostly left-of-center power tweeters already dislike Musk.
Musk now says that verification will cost $8, not $20, and will come in a package that includes “advantages” in tweet replies, mentions and searches, half as many ads and the ability to post long-form videos to the services. Twitter. This is less severe, but carrots are problems in their own right. Currently, tweets travel democratically. If something gets a lot of retweets, likes or replies, more people will see it. Ideally, though certainly not always, this is because a tweet is good. In the version of Twitter that Musk is describing, a tweet will have a better chance of traveling because an everyday user has paid for it to get “priority.” This plan essentially turns every tweet from anyone using Twitter Blue, the company’s subscription plan, into a paid ad. Paid advertisers they don’t even want it. Twitter’s lure for them is to place their ads among posts that people have organically decided they want to see, not to compete with an army of posters paying $8 a month in hopes of rising above the noise.
It is widely believed that a plan like this will be a boon to Twitter’s bottom line, which will no longer be for public consumption now that Musk has taken the firm private. I don’t think many people currently subscribe to Twitter Blue, because Twitter made an obvious choice to leave its subscription data vague in its recent earnings release as a public company. Twitter lost $270 million in the second quarter of 2022. It said it had about $100 million in “subscription and other” revenue in those three months. It didn’t say how much was “subscribed” and how much was “other,” or how many people had subscribed since Twitter Blue came out in 2021. I’m a subscriber because I’m a degenerate. But that’s for $4.99 a month, not $8, and because I post a lot of typos and asked for the ability to “undo” tweets before they go live. It takes a lot of dusty napkin math for me to see Musk selling enough $8 subscriptions with these features to significantly change Twitter’s trajectory for the better. I’m not sure what I’m going to do yet, but I might as well ANDsubscribe if it becomes clear that regular Twitter users think it’s embarrassing to pay for verification. This is a real risk. It seems much more metal to engage someone on Twitter the old-fashioned way.
Musk has other ideas for improving Twitter’s financial situation. One he is widely reported to be considering is mass layoffs. Some of Musk’s tech investors and peers have a theory that tech companies are massively over leveraged as a rule. Maybe they are right! If they are, Musk could generate significant savings. If they aren’t, it could make Twitter worse and drive users away. The best these users can hope for is that any job cuts don’t make things significantly worse. I’m skeptical, but who knows.
These seem to be Musk’s ideas: On the one hand, there’s a bogus plan to squeeze more money out of existing Twitter users, and on the other, there’s (probably) a plan to improve margins by cutting staff.
What’s missing is a plan to make Twitter better for a critical mass of people who spend time on it. Musk has flirted via tweet with the idea of bringing back Vine, a once-beloved short-form video platform that Twitter ditched after it failed to make money. That would be refreshing, and perhaps Musk is smart enough to take advantage of it in a way that Twitter’s old management couldn’t. But Musk can do much more. I think Matt Yglesias is suggesting that Musk could rely on features that help people personalize their experiences and get rid of annoyances: More things like Twitter circles, where people can tweet to small groups of their followers. (Perhaps Twitter Spaces, the company’s entry into live audio sweepstakes, could also be walled off to small groups.) More tools to help users manage potential harassment, like automated deletion of old tweets and mass blocking or muting functions.
There are also better ways to take advantage of Twitter’s power users than to delete the verification system. For example, many of those power users — “addicts” is a better word, and I include myself — rely heavily on TweetDeck, a Twitter interface that the company owns but has scaled back for years. This ignorance probably stems from the fact that TweetDeck doesn’t make much money from Twitter as a free service. It’s a critical tool for the media and many other professionals who use Twitter, thanks to features such as the ability to schedule tweets and view many different lists of tweets at once. But the feature is also a mess. Many tweets are not displayed properly. The scheduling feature is uncomfortable. The search button works half the time. If Twitter would put some serious engineering muscle into making TweetDeck a better product, I would with pleasure i pay $20 a month for it. Twitter has different support tools for different types of professional users, and all of them can get the company more money if they focus on their superpower. And here’s a bonus: Improving features like TweetDeck doesn’t mean upsetting the entire balance of Twitter’s information ecosystem.
The difficulty for Musk is that even if he makes every business decision at Twitter for years, he has a tough road ahead. Buying Twitter for $54.20 per share was an extremely bad idea. The world’s richest guy is never really desperate, but it will be hard for Musk not to be a financial loser in a deal where he admits he overpaid and frantically tried to get out of lockup. If Musk can pull it off, it won’t be because he chose business over far-right flattery. That is necessary, but not sufficient. Instead, any success he has will revolve around how quickly Musk realizes what Twitter is really good at. in.
