The Musk buyout of Twitter is all but done, and even before the blo…ink dried on the contracts, the scent of Musk permeates the social service.
According to the Verge:
Musk has a deadline to close the purchase of Twitter by October 28th. In a sign the deal is proceeding, Twitter froze its employees’ equity awards, Bloomberg reported. Anonymous sources tell The Post that the deal is moving forward in good faith.
Among bright boy’s planned changes? Mass layoffs of over 7500 of what he considers ‘low performing’ employees. This means we can kiss content moderation good-bye. Which means we’ll be inundated with spam, scams, misinformation, and most likely, Trump.
Twitter has always been my favorite social media site. It’s the best source not only for breaking news, but also the more obscure but in-depth news pieces that don’t always float to the top in our attention-grabbing spaces.
I’ve also enjoyed the brilliance of the writing. Anyone can write 10,000 words and eventually make a point—lord knows, I’ve tried—but it takes mad skills to do so in 140280 characters.
Then there’s the people. There are folks with a few followers, folks with millions, but regardless, they have something to say and we want to hear it. Twitter is good at this.
The old Twitter. Not the newly Musked Twitter.
No, the Musked Twitter will be monetized to a degree that will take our breath away (or smother us, whichever comes first). Every bad actor kicked off of the site will be welcomed back, starting with the worst of the worst, Trump. Forget trying to stop the spread of misinformation—if the lies mean profit, the more lies the merrier.
What’s scarier is the fact that the news media trolls Twitter looking for the stories it should cover. Twitter has already had a bad impact on news coverage—I hate to think how much worse it can get with Musk and his ego in charge. Probably All Trump, All the Time. Excuse me, make that All Musk, Trump part of the Time.
My days as one of the birds of Twitter are numbered.
7 replies on “Twitter is about to be Musked”
The good version of Twitter was all the way back when following someone meant that you saw all of their tweets, including replies to people you don’t follow. It made discovering other people to follow and finding new communities entirely organic. They nixed that supposedly because due to scaling woes, but it was never rolled back and Twitter never found its way again. This Twitter we have today, where discovery relies on other people consciously choosing to amplify tweets by retweeting, is basically geared toward surfacing amplifiable soundbites, which in practice means outrage. I’m sure this performs better in terms of business metrics. But the social dynamic it revolves around is people going “^^ This!”, as opposed to around eavesdropping on semi-public conversations and picking up who’s interesting and who’s obnoxious based on their interactions with others – what gave early Twitter its atmosphere of strolling around a town square and chatting away with cliques of locals. All gone now.
I do like Twitter for the very good people, and I really like the concept of the threaded tweets.
But I just can’t see feeding the machine that Musk wants.
It’s funny but early Twitter was more like an abbreviated weblogging than what it is today.
Now if we had some way of syndicating blogs from interesting people and someone (perhaps Google) could surface their posts in some kind of reader… Nah, that wouldn’t work…
I was just thinking, of what I wouldn’t give to have Reader come back…
100% love what you wrote S!
Thanks! Like old times!