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January 2, 2024 - 6:00pm
The rumours of Twitter/X’s death have been exaggerated, but they haven’t been fabricated. Mutual fund company Fidelity has been lowering its valuation of its X shares over the last year, to the point where it now estimates that the social media company is worth 70% less than the $44 billion Musk paid for it, of which Fidelity contributed over $300 million.
To be sure, that decline is overstated. X was never worth $44 billion, a fact Musk now admits. The real comparison should be against Twitter’s value had Musk never bought the company (and thus not changed the name). Since Twitter was almost never profitable even before his purchase, it’s hard to divide blame for Fidelity’s devaluation between Musk’s antics and X/Twitter’s fundamental lack of a business model.
It is, however, safe to say that Musk hasn’t been helping matters. An ongoing influx of obvious bots, more intrusive advertising-based content, ongoing sporadic outages, and baffling “For You” feed recommendations — alongside a slow attrition of users — has gradually made X a worse experience without offering anything particularly new. Musk’s layoffs of 75% of the company’s staff since his acquisition is embarrassing to both sides, because while it has left X in a less than functional state, the decline seems nowhere near 6,500 people’s worth of difference.
The decaying user experience is at the heart of the problem, not sideshows like Musk telling advertisers to go to hell or letting Alex Jones back on the platform. Whether one thinks Jones returning is a good or bad thing, it matters little to X’s bottom line, in part because its bottom line has never been promising, and even Musk’s caterwauling has only made it moderately less so. The past optimism around Twitter’s fortunes was in the hope of an acquisition by a giant like Google or Facebook, not a hypothetical independent success. With Musk having quashed that possibility without any other apparent plan to redeem it, X is a dead platform walking.
And yet X endures, like a zombie, with little sign of redemption or of final death. Would-be competitors like Bluesky and Threads haven’t built up traction, and the cause is ironically the unwillingness of many, including X’s loudest critics, to desert the platform that gives them a voice. This bizarre symbiosis is one of the most toxic manifestations of the network effect: a platform whose present value lies mostly in its appeal to the online technorati and their ever-diminishing clout. While a large-scale technical failure or catastrophic management decisions could still hasten X’s demise, it now looks more likely to fade away than to burn out.
David Auerbach is an American author and former Microsoft and Google software engineer.
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SubscribeTwitter is the internet in microcosm: a howling wasteland populated only by dogs and ghosts, introduced into the world by Satan to drive mankind mad.
Not dogs, they’re far too bright.
I look int a mirror and I see neither dog nor ghost.
I only got on X/Twitter after Musk bought it, but IMHO:
— stick to the Following feed and curate it carefully (eg unfollow anyone who takes it over by tweeting too much). Your For You feed will consist almost completely of random snark and poison from both sides.
— allowing blue tick users to post long form stuff is great, but “read more” sidetracks you into the same poison as For You. It should open in a different tab/window with “Show Comments” optional, as the Spectator does.
No worries, Elon, you’re welcome 🙂
In addition to sticking to the Following feed, as you suggest, I have opted for an even more focused approach: creating a couple of lists that include people whom I really want to follow and be in contact with.
If you pin one of the lists, the feed will appear just next to your Following feed tab. Besides, you can just go directly to the list(s) and enjoy Twitter without any unwanted distractions.
Thanks Vesselina
You are most welcome
If the author really thinks that readmittance to the platform, whatever dumb name Musk gives it, of slime like Alex Jones and Andrew Tate doesn’t hurt the brand then he is kidding himself.
There is no such thing as free speech absolutism. If you give a platform to liars whose “speech” has been proven to cause harm to others then you are partly responsible for the outcomes.
The fact that Musk himself is a laughable clown doesn’t help either…
He is a total clown, and the utter shtshow that X has been is him in a nutshell and it’s just hilarious.
If you give a platform to liars whose “speech” has been proven to cause harm to others then you are partly responsible for the outcomes.
Hey, we give a platform to you.
Where did it all go wrong for this multi billionaire?
It hasn’t.
Sarcasm.
I’ve noticed that champagne socialists love to hate Musk, but have no problems with, say, Bezos and the working conditions in Amazon dark stores or with other super rich whose track record is far from blemished…
Interesting, isn’t it?
Musk doesn’t advocate free speech absolutism. You are spewing nonsense.
I don’t understand what the author means by the demise of X. Does he think it will disappear and Musk will have to shut it down, never to be heard of again? That doesn’t sound likely to me. Maybe I’m wrong.
The slow attrition in users quoted in the item links to a 2022 article, forecasting a continuing drop in users.
Hardly concrete evidence on which to base any conclusions
Indeed. This article is an excellent example of having a narrative, then fishing for whatever facts you can bend to fit that narrative.
Musk didn’t buy Twitter because he thought it was worth 44bn. He bought it in order to create a space with enough network effects to allow a free speech platform to exist on the internet.
The failure of Threads proves that he was right at least about the size of the network effect.
And while I agree that the user experience on Twitter is horrible, frankly speaking the user experience on all social media is horrible. Social media is a poop-soaked cesspool.
Indeed, this narrative is rather baffling.
The narrative in MSM is even more dramatic: they are full of horror stories about Twitter, ‘mis/disinformation’ there and its imminent collapse.
At the same time MSM are exalting Facebook and Instagram which are just keeping afloat due to the inertia of their users.(Am delicately not mentioning Threads or Metaverse that failed even to take off).
Difficult not to think about product placement paid by the owner of FB, IG, etc. At least, this is my impression…
Btw, FB and IG for sure are not paragons of credible information, either, and bots are rife there, too. But MSM have no objections to this, obviously.
So to summarise: Musk paid $44 billion for a rarely profitable platform which by its nature was doomed to near futility, and then he took a number of decisions which made things worse.
Verily, the man is a genius.
Must be my age but never really got the whole Twitter concept. Welcome brevity and concise English for sure, but signing up to receive the thoughts of others in 140 characters not exactly designed to aid neuronal health is it?
Now we get some ‘peculiar and possibly unique’ comments on Unherd, but we are all commenting an article that has, usually, made us think and is not limited to 140 characters.
You’d love it. You can leave out all the verbs and prepositions.
It’s now 280 characters for regular users and unlimited if you pay for the blue tick.
The latter, in my opinion, was not a good idea, because the beauty of Twitter is, among other things, in the brevity of posts.
Twitter combined with Substack has developed some serious political weight. It’s likely Gay would still be Harvard President if TwitterX was not around. It does feel like it has lost some left-wing voices and trolls as twitterers show less tolerance for drive-by talking points, but politically it has become more interesting, at least to people who like that type of stuff.
He destroyed its ability to be used as a home base for raids and pile-ons, so for that I am thankful.
Its a far right cess pit populated by morons and racists.
You guys must feel right at home…
“Drive-by talking points”… Regurgitating partisan spew as comment spam doesn’t work any more (if it ever did). It’s the equivalent of neaderthal grunting while everyone else is having a conversation.
This is cute!
You regurgitate the talking points from Breitbart and you think you are having a “conversation”?
Brmmm. Brmmm.
Smartest thing you have said yet!
As far as I can tell Musk achieved his purpose with Twitter the moment he bought it. He lives to drive those he dislikes mad and with Twitter in his hands the central node in Terminally Online Progressivism has been irreparably harmed. If only had happened a decade ago before this stuff soaked out into the real world.
If you think he is making anyone mad by making a complete fool of himself then good for you!
Of course all he has done is destroy whatever value there was in Twitter by his comically inept stewardship. His grotesque pandering to the vilest internet trolls like Jones and Tate is by the by and only serves to show exactly what Musk is.