If you’re an “independent content creator” - which is I guess what I am for the time being - that deal might be worth it for you. ) But at least in principle, I have no problem with Musk making it harder to direct traffic to external links if he’s making up for that by paying you directly. It may be because my blue checkmark was gifted to me along with other people with 1+ million followers. (I’ve never been paid, despite getting a lot of - positive and negative - engagement. Musk, to his credit, has sometimes directly paid Twitter users, although the program has been haphazard and the standards for getting paid are unclear. Although to be fair to Musk, their business model never worked particularly well. The previous ownership at Twitter at least seemed to understand that publishers wanted to use the platform not so much as a virtual town square but as a place where you could hawk your wares and invite people into your space. And I didn’t particularly like their garden - I wanted you to see the beautiful data visualizations we built at FiveThirtyEight, not a crappy-looking version interspersed with photos of your cousin’s bachelorette party. FiveThirtyEight articles rarely had the emotional cadence that Facebook’s algorithm rewarded. I’ve never posted much at Facebook, because the deal didn’t seem worth it. Facebook wanted you in their walled garden you wanted them to send you copious amounts of traffic. This, of course, was always the tension between publishers and Facebook. But the reason I go to Twitter in the first place is to find those interesting links, all in one place. If I find something interesting to read on Substack via Twitter, that might end my current session on Twitter. This might be another case of a short-sighted algorithm solving for a local rather than a global optimum. Musk’s algorithm wants to keep people on X, and external links reduce time spent on X, he says. Musk has made some noises about this improving Twitter’s aesthetics - but his primary motivation is clear : There are workarounds: you can embed the headline in the image, for instance, as you saw if you clicked over from Twitter to this post. The latest change at Twitter is that previews to external links no longer display headlines, just images. (I have no idea how much of this differences are algorithmic versus organic.) But I’m not an idiot: 3.3 million followers is a good sales funnel, even of some of those subscribers are bots - or hate my guts. The conversion rate from Twitter is often lower than you might think - there have been some posts that got quite a lot of traffic from Twitter, but other times it’s been like trying to squeeze blood out of a stone. I’m trying to sell this newsletter, and next year I’ll be trying to sell a book, perhaps along with other new ventures. Those followers are both a curse - because they increase the switching costs of moving away from Twitter - and a blessing. If you reran the world and Twitter had been founded slightly earlier or later, I think I’d end up with a reasonably large following, but not the 3.3 million people I wound up with. However, it helped me to have been one of the early “stars” on Twitter. Instead the mid-2010’s were the era of the Facebook News Feed and the mostly shitty content it rewarded. Īlthough Twitter did continue to add users after 2012, it did not gain influence. Overall, I see his stewardship of Twitter as having been mostly negative, but with notable exceptions - the increased use of Community Notes, for instance - and most of the problems I have with Twitter predated Musk. I don’t want to provide an overly simplified takeaway about Musk here while I’m working out the thesis for the more complicated one. Elon is very much in my headspace these days - the chapter I’m currently writing in my book is about venture capital and Silicon Valley, and Musk plays a prominent role in it. I also have deeply ambivalent feelings about Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, who has renamed the platform ‘X’. The dunking culture of Twitter and the way it tends to gamify tribalism is a big negative, particularly if you don’t quite fit in with the dominant tribes. And while I think Twitter is extremely valuable as a way to follow the news, I have mostly negative feelings about whether it’s been good for our democracy. As a person who’s been a frequent subject of criticism on the platform - often in ways that I think are misinformed or unfair - I’m sometimes uncertain whether it’s been worth the psychological toil. Don’t get me wrong: I have deeply ambivalent feelings about it.
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