July 6, 2023 - 1:00pm
As Twitter flails, Facebook has made its move — or so it may seem. In the early hours of Thursday, the company, otherwise known as Meta, released Threads, its Twitter alternative. Calling it a “Twitter killer” may give Facebook too much credit, since Twitter itself is taking care of that. Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has vowed to create a “friendly public space for conversation” — in other words, like what Twitter was supposed to be. Short public messages, real-time responses, Instagram and Facebook integration: what’s not to like?
Given the last 12 months of chaos at Twitter, Threads is a sensible move from Meta, yet it’s still closer to musical chairs than actual growth. Following talk of a potential cage fight between Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, the new app slots neatly next to the macho posturing as another display of one-upmanship.
Facebook has not had a good few years. The company’s stock is yet to return to its 2021 peak after falling by over two-thirds, and the last few years have yielded several wildly different strategies, from secure private messaging to the VR-driven metaverse. With large language model (LLM) AI now driving tech prices skyward once again, Zuckerberg needs to keep options open in the likely event that these models fail to deliver on their hype (as Facebook’s own head of AI Yann LeCun has repeatedly said).
Taking on Twitter is, from some angles, a no-brainer. The site has slowly declined in functionality and usability since Musk’s takeover, with no apparent strategy emerging from the chaos. Amid ongoing executive turnover, collapsing ad revenues, desperate monetisation activities, and general disorder, Musk has now introduced unpopular rate limits for both writing and reading tweets due to companies “scraping vast amounts of data”.
Take it from an ex-server engineer who worked at Google and Microsoft: visibly crippling active users is not how to handle scraping, legitimate or otherwise. The whole exercise has an air of executive caprice, with Musk furious that his already unprofitable service is costing more money without benefiting him. Having severely overpaid for his plaything, he has publicly floated one unfeasible method after another to try to extract blood from the Twitter stone. None of them has a chance of working, certainly not at this point. The scraping is just adding insult to (self-)injury.
There is a bigger transition going on, though — namely, the slow death of the first generation of social media. After 15 years or so of growth, churn and flux, Twitter is only the most egregious case of a problem also facing Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit: stagnant or declining fortunes. When Reddit triggered an ongoing revolt among its volunteers by cutting off free third-party API access, it was really facing the same wall against which Musk continues to bang his head. In the low-interest-rate 2010s, Wall Street and private equity firms considered users and engagement a speculative proxy for future revenue growth. These days, pretty much the only thing that points to revenue growth is, well, actual revenue growth.
While Facebook is uniquely positioned to leverage its existing user base in order to bootstrap a public-facing Twitter clone, there remains the inconvenient truth that Twitter never made much money to begin with, turning a small profit only in 2018 and 2019. Facebook can likely squeeze more from such a platform than Twitter ever did, but it will hardly restore Zuckerberg’s company to the exponential growth it once enjoyed. Compared to Apple or Amazon, Facebook’s position is precarious, because social media itself is precarious.
There remains a role for some kind of Twitter-like service, by which truly important news can spread rapidly. But there’s no clear reason why that role ought to be a lucrative one, and for those desperate to make it one, there will likely be more desperate and bizarre strategies to come.
David Auerbach is the author of Meganets and a former Microsoft and Google software engineer.
David Auerbach is an American author and former Microsoft and Google software engineer.
AuerbachKeller
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribePerhaps the bottom line of this complex (really circuitous) essay is valuable as it emerges from the morass of the prose. Ultimately, cancel culture is an unacceptable practice for any classical liberal no matter what or to whom. However, not every firing or de-friending is cancel culture. For example, if a Secret Service agent tweeted some joke about an attempted assassination, they should be fired for dereliction of duty. Similarly, if the Catholic Pope declared fealty to Satan on X, he should be deposed. Lastly, if the Marketing Director of PepsiCo posted that Pepsi is swill on their Facebook timeline, out. And if you no longer want to maintain a personal friendship with someone who showed up to softball practice in a Klan robe, you are displaying freedom of association and good judgment. Those are not examples of cancel culture… True cancel culture, as practiced by either the Left or Right, must end…
What’s good for the Goose is good for the Gander ….
All demographic assessments of the political spectrum agree that the left contains a greater proportion of more highly educated people. The same is true for academia itself, for media (journalism and entertainment–to the degree those remain separate things), for art, and for fashion. Generally the Left enjoys the advantage of creativity. It logically follows that the Left would be more adept at pioneering creative political weaponization such as cancel culture. But they do so often without consideration as to the inevitability of the Right eventually also mimetically adopting those weapons. Since the Left considers themselves morally superior to the knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers on the Right (their stereotype, not mine), is that not inherently dangerous to empower an enemy who–they have said–cannot be trusted? The Left is, therefore, analogous to the tragic phenomenon often seen in the U.S. of parents purchasing an automatic weapon to have around the home where they also have a very troubled grown child. They cannot imagine that this child will use the gun in a school shooting or assassination attempt. The Left should be more wary of the weapons they create.
Interestingly, when you read Milo’s comment in the light of his new faith (Catholicism), it is not surprising. Catholics in many ways have abdicated their role in the public square for far too long.
Maybe that’s why we have the likes of James Martin, Rupnik, McCarrick, Bugnini, and Bergolio to name but a few.
Exsurge Domine (arise Lord) and may we have the courage and wisdom to do His Will in all realms of society.
Like all rights, free speech comes with responsibilities. When you exercise your right to cheer for someone’s murder or to lament that a would-be assassin failed, you have every right to that belief. By the same token, your employer has every right to distance from that belief because wanting one’s opponents killed is a bad look.
The psychology of cancellation leads to political violence because, for the impressionable young mind, why debate or even influence when you can eliminate (Evil)?
In that the Right should not copy the Democrats and their liberal grad hive-mind. The Left always see politics as a battle to eliminate Evil- education of the ignorant first, then elimination of the perceived extremes.
Competitive advantage is the lifeblood of business, so why not politics? It is naive and complacent to imagine that your competitors will not 1. Match you or 2. Exceed you. All else is for the birds.
The idiot who wrote this article evidently didn’t bother to verify whether the ten people had *actually* been sacked, or whether the – anonymous, partisan and intemperate – Tiktoker was lying.
I’ll never understand why some people disqualify themselves so easily by senselessly using insults. Just writing “the author” instead would have elevated your comment immeasurably.
I don’t think, personally, that cancel culture ever sought to accomplish a coherent set of goals: instead, it appears to be more about scapegoating and the pleasures associated with that (now very online) activity. Pretty much as described by René Girard in “Violence and the Sacred”, really. When considered in that context, its internal inconsistencies become less relevant, i.e. the need for explicit, consistent aims loses its relevance.
Social media has created global outlets for mob behaviour.
Pretty simple really.
Mob behaviour and tribalism are historic human constants, but usually restricted by local norms and restraints, and tribal aversion to conflict escalation.
Internet tech removes local constraints and unleashes these elements of human nature on a global decontextualized scale.
The dissolution of shared norms into competing normative and digital spheres will proceed apace alongside the continued erosion of localised institutional procedures in the face of viral media. Whatever such a society might look like, it won’t be well-ordered or pious.
This statement is an open issue. Things are equally likely to get worse or better; unlike the author, I would not make such bold predictions.
Although, it seems to me, the probability of the collapse of society is quite high. It seems to me that this is due to people’s loss of religiosity. Even on this site, most people pride themselves on believing in the “kingdom of reason,” although history and what is unfolding before our eyes inexorably proves that there is nothing crazier than believing in the rationality of the crowd.
In the recent past there lived Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. They all were building a “reasonable” societies.
Just today, a correspondent is interviewing residents of California and they are all convinced that the attempt on Trump’s life was staged. These same “reasonable” people are sure that a man can become a woman, and a woman a man, since sex, which they call gender, is a product of education and the fact that even the brains of a man and a woman are physically structured differently does not matter.
The mind is prone to narcissism, and the collective mind is prone to total delusions; religion, no matter what you think about it, not only formulates moral maxims, but also unites people and requires them to be modest in assessing themselves.
The assumption that lack of religiosity is due to a reliance on the “kingdom of reason” is, as i’ve previously pointed out, false. It makes naive assumptions about human spirituality, failing to understand the well-springs of why some need an external “meaning” imposed upon them whilst others don’t.
How many times are you going to use the phrase “Human Spirituality” before you define it?
“In the recent past there lived Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. They all were building a “reasonable” societies.” –
They most certainly were not. Not even as a pretext … This collection of sociopaths were simply building their own power/ cult of personality (nothing more)…
Yes, they were sociopaths, but in order for sociopaths to gain power, faith must be destroyed.