Earlier this month, Elon Musk assumed control of twitter. In a Twitter Spaces last week, he declared a series of goals for the company, some of which included:
For twitter to be a digital town square with 80% of humanity on it
For twitter to be in the business of truth & increase the signal to noise ratio
Delving further into each objective:
To be a digital Town Square with 80% of humanity on it: This seems to be his ultimate vision – to create a digital counterpart to the physical phenomenon of a space where people can gather and dispel views on a regular basis. Except, participants aren’t restricted by space constraints as in a classic Town Square — anyone can participate, at anytime. Meaning, the orchestrator of this space (Elon) has to set the rules for how this massive discourse-center with infinite perspectives will be moderated, including who gets to speak, who gets thrown out of the space, and the bounds of acceptable speech.
As a “free-speech absolutist”, Elon’s stance here is that freedom of speech does not equate to freedom of reach, and that Twitter believes in the former: “we have to be tolerant of views we don’t agree with, which doesn’t necessarily mean amplifying those views,” he said in the Spaces conversation. From a product standpoint, this will translate into making platform exiles less permanent for non-repeat offenders — for example, by turning permanent bans into temporary suspensions
The obvious implication — the potential for hate speech to escalate under the guise of free speech — is already being observed. Forbes reported a spike in antisemitic, homophobic, transphobic, and racist content within 12 hours of Musk taking over. And significant downsizing of content moderation, human rights, curation, & accessibility teams doesn’t bode well for promoting inclusivity.
The second implication is the rapidly declining spend from advertisers, who are spooked by potential loosening restrictions around content moderation; advertisers make up ~90% of the company’s revenues.
To be in the business of truth & increase the signal to noise ratio: this entails 1) eliminating bots, and 2) verifying users; both of which can be directionally achieved by users self-validating through Twitter Blue. Musk’s reasoning: $8/mo is a high enough barrier that it will weed out most non-authentic users, leading to a higher-signal platform, and a movement closer to “truth”. But open questions remain:
Do non-Twitter Blue users get filtered out as bots/spam, or de-prioritised by the algorithm?
What does being in the business of “truth” look like in the absence of robust content moderation?
Does the value derived from twitter in a given year equate to ~$100 for most users? Is twitter willing to forego the long-tail of users who would be unwilling or unable to pay a monthly subscription?
There seem to be numerous reasons twitter could fail amidst the recent upheaval: mass exodus of advertisers, talent attrition, user churn due to poor content moderation, accessibility, brand image, etc.
My prediction is that if twitter fails, it will be primarily due to the speed & inconsistency with which they are shipping feature updates & making product changes — rapid product cycles, and deviating from their core offering, will be the ultimate cause of user abandonment. Here’s why:
Users don’t adapt to a digital interface overnight — through time spent on a platform, they slowly learn how to navigate it and master its intricacies.
User onboarding can be described as a form of operant conditioning — completing “correct” actions (e.g., clicking the right button) will result in a reward (e.g., a new menu opening), while “incorrect” actions will result in negative (e.g., error message, red signs) or no reinforcement. Thus, users are subliminally trained to interact with with a product through its continuous use.
The easier a product is to use, the more time a user will spend on it; the more time a user spends on the platform, the easier it becomes to use. This cycle breaks when feature updates occur — now, a user has to relearn how to perform the same actions within a new interface.
To minimise the cognitive burden associated with re-learning the interface after feature updates (e.g., searching for links under restructured menus), incremental product updates should occur over large periods of time. Larger apps often make few, minor feature updates at a time — for more significant changes, they may A/B test, or roll out features in cohorts, to preserve the integrity of the users’ experience & de-risk new functionality.
Under Elon, Twitter has taken the exact opposite approach: rapid product cycles, new features daily, deploying functionality and then retracting it, killing offerings, firing & rehiring teams working on core experiences…
Beyond this, he is changing the rules of the game — widening and narrowing the feature set accompanying an $8 Twitter Blue subscription, killing adjacent offerings (e.g., Revue), and doling out verified checkmarks.
The cognitive dissonance seeing verified checkmarks commonplace cannot be understated. For years, the symbol was reserved as a designation of authority or legitimacy — overnight, users are expected to calibrate their mental models to accommodate its rapidly changing meanings
Musk defends checkmarks as markers of authenticity — a movement in the direction of ‘truth’ towards which twitter 2.0 will strive — but the flood of misinformation & false accounts over the past week is evidence of poor, hasty execution. An institution can’t be re-invented in a single month — user behaviour is sticky, and requires lag time.
Apple conquered the smartphone market not because it swooped in with scores of new features packed into a single offering, executing a genius’s vision all at once, but because its simple initial offering invited users across demographics to learn how to use the product. And since 2007, it has slowly layered in complex functionality, training cohorts of users, one software update at a time, to become digitally native.
Twitter is not a deep-tech startup that can flourish by draconian enforcement of deadlines to engineer & execute a massive product undertaking overnight. Creating a true digital town square with 80% of humanity requires the creation of a persistent digital paradigm, not one that glitches and updates periodically for billions of users due to spontaneous real-time product iterations.
If making changes to core product, Musk should incrementally introduce significant feature updates; otherwise, acclimation costs may be the decisive factor in user churn & abandonment.
Views are my own and do not represent those of my employer.