About six months ago, Elon Musk bought your favorite
neighborhood bar. Then he fired veteran bouncers and bartenders, tried to stiff
the landlord and at least one vendor, and demanded that regulars pay a cover
charge. He has frequently struggled to serve his customers, yet he has
penalized them for mentioning the competition. He has tamped down the revelry
in general, really — a lot of conversation at his watering hole has been
drowned out by Musk’s own never-ending stage act, which consists mainly of him
yelling dad jokes at customers through a bullhorn.
اضافة اعلان
Pour one out for Twitter, then. I had been open to Musk’s
purchase of the social network, but half a year in, it has been an unmitigated
disaster. Musk moved fast and broke nearly everything — the speed and totality
with which he has ruined the site has been almost impressive. By Musk’s own
reckoning, the company is now worth less than half of what he paid for it. It
has lost many large advertisers, most of its employees and, with them, much of
its functionality.
More than that, Twitter under Musk appears to have lost the
thing that made it impossible to quit: Its centrality. The site was once the
most consequential place online, not just a disseminator of breaking news and
commentary, but something like an arbiter. At its cultural peak, from about
2015 to perhaps 2020, what people talked about on Twitter seemed to set the
agenda for discussions elsewhere. Even last year, it still mattered: After years
of mismanagement and glacial innovation, Twitter, on the eve of Musk’s reign,
was still the one place to visit when anything big happened anywhere.
Musk moved fast and broke nearly everything — the speed and totality with which he has ruined the site has been almost impressive.
Whatever Twitter is now, it is no longer that venue.
Cultural relevance is difficult to quantify, but you know it when you feel it.
And now, when something’s going down, Twitter rarely feels like the place where
everyone is gathering to watch.
I noticed this when Donald Trump was arraigned. Trump, the
most powerful tweeter the world has ever known, a man whose every typo could
send Twitter into paroxysms of easy dunks, appeared in court and Twitter was,
as Vox’s Shirin Ghaffary put it, “a snoozefest.”
There could be many reasons for the snooze, including that
people care less about Trump than they used to — or that even after Musk
reinstated Trump’s suspended Twitter account, the former president has stuck to
using the platform he founded, Truth Social, for his ad hoc missives.
But I would bet much of the problem stems from changes Musk
has made to Twitter’s news feed.
These days it is often difficult to know what’s happening on
Twitter. Musk’s self-serving changes to the site’s ranking algorithm have
significantly reduced its usability: Where Twitter was once pleasantly varied,
serving up ordinary people’s tweets pretty evenly with those of celebrities and
politicians, now it seems to highlight the same few users all the time. (I love
your tweets, Matt Yglesias, but I wish you were not always at the top of my
feed!)
Where Twitter was once pleasantly varied, serving up ordinary people’s tweets pretty evenly with those of celebrities and politicians, now it seems to highlight the same few users all the time.
Other signs of Twitter’s declining relevancy: Several news
organizations, including The New York Times, have said they will noy pay for
Twitter Blue, Musk’s subscription service for acquiring a verified user badge
on the site. NPR said it would stop posting to its official Twitter accounts
because Twitter labeled it as “state-affiliated media,” then as
“government-funded media.” PBS, which has also been labeled
“government-funded,” said that it, too, would stop tweeting in protest of the
label. (NPR is a nonprofit that receives very little funding from the
government; the label, it says, undermines its credibility.)
Musk does not like the news media — Twitter’s public
relations email address auto-responds with a poop emoji — but I cannot see how
fighting with the media can help his site. At the risk of blowing my own horn,
media organizations are vital to Twitter because the news is at the core of the
site’s utility.
Musk has said that Twitter’s algorithms won’t recommend
unverified users in its “For You” section, and that the free verification
badges — the simultaneously coveted and maligned blue checks — that many
journalists have will soon be removed. The change will further reduce Twitter’s
usefulness: If many journalists are removed from the site’s primary feeds, why
would people continue to see it as their go-to news source?
As I have argued before, Twitter has been a font of misinformation, an accelerant to polarization and a contributor to cultural groupthink.
As a longtime tweeter, Musk’s trashing of the service
saddens and angers me. Twitter’s employees and users didn’t deserve this fate.
In the hands of a less volatile, more thoughtful leader, Twitter could have
been so much more than the raggedy fiefdom of a thin-skinned billionaire it has
become.
But as a person who wants to live in a just world with
friendly people and nice things, I’m not altogether broken up about Twitter’s
decline. As I have argued before, Twitter has been a font of misinformation, an
accelerant to polarization and a contributor to cultural groupthink. Just
before Musk’s takeover, my Times colleague Michelle Goldberg, worrying about
similar problems, hoped for a quick, spectacular flameout: “If Musk makes Twitter
awful enough,” she wrote, “users will flee, and it will become less relevant.”
Well, it looks like Michelle got her wish. Stick a fork in
it, Elon: Twitter is done.
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