Are you entertained yet? Twitter is Twittering

And a few scattered links

December 20, 2022

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Oh, Twitter!

Here’s Buzzfeed’s Katie Notopoulos’ love letter to Twitter from almost two months ago when the drama was crazy and hadn’t entered the absurd territory:

I know it’s not cool to admit to liking Twitter, but I’m not afraid: Fuck, I love Twitter. I love reading tweets, I love tweeting. I’m such a twitcuck I actually pay for Twitter Blue. I don’t care who knows it. I wake up in the morning and the first thing I do is unhinge my jaw like a snake, fire up Twitter, and gobble down a massive quantity of tweets. On my deathbed, I’ll look at my beautiful family and hoarsely whisper, “I only wish I had more time to spend reading tweets.

Ditto

I want to believe Twitter will still be OK, because I love Twitter. How can you log on and see something like this and not love it? But I don’t just love the jokes, I love all of it: the subtweets, the humblebrags, the draggings, the ratios, the dunks, the milkshake ducks, the tweetstorms, the nameflames. I won’t apologize for this. This is me, this is who I am. I love Twitter, and I don’t care who knows it.

I would quit Twitter only if the app shuts down (not likely) or Elon bans me (who knows!). Not voluntarily, basically.

Elon, man!

The shitposting grandmaster, with mind-blowingly absurd instincts, strikes again.

The joke is on all of us for wanting a Twitter CEO who actually uses the app as a power user. His fans hate how much they love him, and his critics love how much they hate him.

I recently wrote about the doxxing episode, which had some resemblance to the prior shadowbanning episode. All of that from 3 whole days ago feels too stale now.

A new season unexpectedly dropped! During the World Cup final on Sunday! Talk about the timing! This is old news too but we’ll talk about it today.

From the Verge :

Twitter will no longer allow users to promote their presence on certain social platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr, and Post. In a post outlining these changes, Twitter says it will take action against users that violate this policy “at both the Tweet level and the account level.”

This means users can no longer include links to their profiles on other social networks in their Twitter bio, nor can they send out tweets directing users to check out their Instagram or Facebook accounts. The policy doesn’t just include links from other platforms, either; it even extends to posting usernames or handles from competing platforms without URLs.

Welcome back Kendrick, nothing really has happened!

Anyway, as you might know, the new policy page has been taken down from its website, and the corporate account announcement tweets are also gone! All within hours of the announcement after an outpouring of outrage and hysteria.

I had some immediate takes as well, of course :

This new season’s first episode lasted a few hours in isolation. They announced something. People got very mad. Lots of hot takes are thrown around. The chaotic Executive Officer, per his MO, shared his thoughts in comments in random threads. Elon's allies came out swinging in support. They took it down within a day. No official acknowledgment or notice. If you were off Twitter for a few hours during the relevant timeframe, you would likely have missed an entire cycle on a chronological feed.

To be fair to the current regime, this isn’t the first time Twitter has blocked another network to bootstrap off of its graph. By the way, this was just the main plot.

There were multiple subplots playing out. New details on the doxxing saga dropped. The Washington Post’s high-profile internet culture reporter’s account was suspended and restored within a few hours. Those two stories are somewhat connected depending on what version of events you believe.

Maximum entertainment and conspirational value for everyone.

Amidst all this, our Shitposting King dropped a new poll, asking more than one-third of Twitter’s MAU if he should step down as the head of the company he just bought after spending months getting out of an agreement for buying it. Why shouldn’t democratic polls run the town square on the platform? Let’s pretend Elon stepping down from the CEO job wasn’t always the plan and is widely known.

The main plot is getting more convoluted and fast-paced than the show How To Get Away With Murder.

That brings me to what I actually want to talk about. What exactly is going on inside Twitter? We have seen this policy change cycle repeat a few times now.

I have a few theories :

  • Our whimsical edge lord is really nervous about the upcoming debt interest payment, dwindling cash flow, tanking revenue, and falling Tesla stock price. The meme lord flies out to watch the World Cup, gets in a sporty upbeat mood, and whimsically pulls up Slack and excitedly messages his team and war room homies to ban links to social networks that he has seen many high-profile users linking out to. He probably thinks it would be fun and might reduce churn by reducing awareness of alternatives and increase engagement by getting people to talk about it. His employees played along and thought it was a great idea and went ahead with the announcement that they likely whipped up right before or during the World Cup final.

  • Another version of the same theory is that he messages the team and gets some pushback from a few brave souls alerting him of potential negative ramifications and blowback. He considers the dissenting view for a few seconds and decides to go ahead. His employees disagreed and committed because what else is there to do? Assuming he actually paid attention to what the employees said, it is entirely possible that the employees failed to make a compelling enough and serious case for why banning links to other social websites would be a bad idea. We don’t know if they leaned on negative PR, users' interests, public embarrassment angle, philosophical arguments, or whatever to make their case. Whatever it was, it didn’t work! Did anyone try, “This will make us look like the biggest pathetic losers, especially after you bragged about peak Twitter usage over the past few weeks!”? This theory assumes employees did try to make a somewhat coherent case, but he refused to listen and weighed the cost-benefit calculus differently. If he is shooting to have fun and create controversy, and the employees are making a boring logical case, it is easy to see how that would lead to this outcome.

  • Another theory is Elon is actually not as involved as we might think with these boring policy decisions. He has five other full-time, arguably more serious and demanding jobs, and being online on Twitter takes up quite a bit of time, as the most influencer user, the CEO doing user research, a globally recognized icon who loves attention, and a global citizen (or a culture warrior) who truly believes in standing up for certain ideals of speech and freedom by chiming in on random politically charged threads in between meetings. In this theory, he has delegated policy decisions to his people. His mandate to the company is to increase revenue, increase usage, and reduce churn immediately. He probably told a few people he is annoyed by how people with large followings keep linking to alternative social apps. An enterprising hardcore engineer, product manager, or policy maker connected the dots and said, “You know what, what if we just ban linking out to rival social apps?” in a brainstorming session, under pressure. That will likely reduce churn because not-super-online users won’t learn about the upcoming apps, increase engagement because it will make people mad or laugh, and increase revenue because the first two metrics are inputs into the revenue equation! Bingo! So they floated the idea with a half-based case to keep their jobs and maintain goodwill with their boss, who likely gave his approval, not paying much attention while having fun on his phone tweeting.

  • Another version of this second theory is that a brave soul in the meeting disagreed with the seemingly metric-moving idea in front of Elon. And that person was competent, thoughtful, and serious enough to see the obvious repercussions of rolling out a policy of blanket banning links or references to other social apps. They tried to reason with Elon and the employee who came up with this idea. Maybe, they even tried to sell Elon on a toned-down version of the policy to restrict it to not allowing people to have accounts exclusively for promoting accounts on other social platforms. In this scenario, Elon probably dismissed or ignored it and gave his approval of the blanket policy.

  • A more optimistic version of the above theory is that, yes, he didn’t listen to alternating views internally, but he does listen to pushback he gets online from users while he is on the app as the CEO doing user research. You can see in his comments that he was trying to walk back on the extreme nature of the policy his company had announced mere hours ago. He might not listen to his own employees, but he listens to his users when they argue for a toned-down version of the policy I talked about above. So he is capable of listening to countering arguments, being reasonable, changing his mind, and not getting too emotionally attached to ideas. The dissenting view just can’t come from Twitter employees. Which is problematic but mostly fine, I guess. The bar is quite low here, so we take what we get. If you want to get angrier, you could think he doesn’t listen to users, but a certain type of user. Isn’t that a reason to rejoice? Is that the silver lining? The organization learns and changes quickly! Of course, a reasonable critique would be it’s so erratic and fickle.

  • I have a third theory that combines the two theories above. And this is the most cynical one. Maybe Elon came up with the idea for the new policy. Or maybe the employees did. Either way, they got together in a room and deliberated over the proposal. Elon wasn’t distracted, and the employees made coherent serious arguments debating the pros and cons of the idea. This wasn’t announced on a whim. They went through a process, got all the relevant stakeholders involved, and planned the announcement. But it didn’t occur to anyone in the group that a toned-down, more targeted version of the policy was a possibility that could support the intended goals (whatever they might be, fun, metrics, or something else) while minimizing the blowback. They just didn’t consider it because no one could think of it! They only debated the most extreme version, considered it the only option, did the cost-benefit analysis, and decided to go ahead. In this version of events, I can’t help but wonder how competent the people are. Presumably, the same group didn’t consider the possibility that paying to get a checkmark on your account can be abused in many obvious, predictable ways less than a month ago! If a big percentage of the most influential voices in this group are all hired guns from his other companies and his buddies who have never worked on social apps, I think it’s not too far-fetched to think this might have happened.

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list. More theories and versions are based on your prior beliefs about the saga before the new season dropped. A reasonable, plausible, entertaining story could be that this is a generational engineering mind speed-running mistakes and lessons from wrongly scoping humans-on-the-internet problems as engineering problems and is now making desperate, erratic moves for a hot mess that he overpaid for. His whimsical personality, political instincts, and absurd proclivities complicate every move and make the plot too absurd to look away from for the very online degens like myself.

Some reactions from the bird app :

Yep:

Lol:

Enforcement of the now banned policy would have been fun:

What’s new on Scatter Brain

Here’s my latest chat with the 1st PM of Amazon Pay in the States, who later went on to become a co-founder of a startup in India, which later merged with a Bangladesh-based startup.

Here’s a relevant bit for navigating the current downturn from his experience going through a rough patch in 2016 running an ecommerce startup :

We were not prepared for black swan events. Demonetisation happened when we were out in the market for our Series C funding during the second half of 2016. It was a triple whammy with huge shipping losses (a returned item costs 2X as forward shipping), negative cash flow, and inability to close funding,” Sujayath said, reflecting on the rough phase of Voonik. “When a company grows, you can easily be cash flow positive as your revenue is higher than the bills due from previous months.”

When growth stalls, the reverse happens, and you get into a death spiral, he told me. They did become profitable eventually. “Profitability at the right scale is needed,” he said to make it worthwhile for him and his investors.

Conventional wisdom is we should align with the market funding climate. Today it will be cutting burn and moving to profitability. Tomorrow it will be market share at any cost. Investors can afford to change their strategy per the market cycle as they have multiple bets. But founders have a single bet. We either create a dent or die as a failure.

Scattered links not about Elon or Twitter

Here’s a wonderful essay on intensity, as a personality trait and idea from Mind Mine’s Isabel, a blogger I recently discovered :

Intensity is a derivative of focus. The word intense is usually used to describe someone that fixates on something with little awareness for what is going on outside of their locus of concentration. In conversation I often get called intense because I tend to zero in on a person and ask them very direct—lovingly deemed deep, but occasionally described as intrusive—questions. To me, this feels normal. I mean: isn’t that the point of conversation? Learn about each other? Explore each other’s minds? But to many, this degree of narrow focus is unfamiliar. Most people are not used to intensity, it makes them squirm.

When you pop out of the intensity membrane, you feel more sensitive, aware, jarred by the world around you. And it makes you want to stay in it. Protected in that warm, safe, sheltered bubble of isolation, because as Bukowski says: “Isolation is the gift.” Isolation enables the intensity. And that’s why intense people grow angsty when they can’t get back to their ‘thing’. They want to be in the membrane. Away from the surface-level triviality of the world.

Here’s Forerunner’s Kirsten Green in a roundup piece on 2023 predictions from Index Ventures’ Rex Woodbury’s Digital Native:

As investors and builders, we spend so much time thinking about what’s next and what new fringe behavior might move mainstream—but I think what’s missing is the understanding that however more complex and diverse the consumer becomes, their needs are still remarkably traditional. In the coming years, I think we’ll see a refreshed focus on core life fundamentals that help people harken back to a more pure, simpler way of living—even if the avenues with which consumers pursue these more traditional values are new.

I find most predictions from tech folks (the typical kinds that get asked to share them) as projections of what they are thinking about or want to see happen. They are rarely “here’s something I think will happen, regardless of my feelings or opinions about it.” I found Green’s comment insightful and underrated. It’s already happening, and it’s easy to notice if you look around closely.

Here are the latest happenings on consumer social from one of my favorite internet culture reporters Mint’s Shepatli Bhatt, out of India:

Abstaining from liking any tweets at all is now seen as an "enormous relief" by some. While others pointed out how 'likes' on Twitter are still used by many as a way of bookmarking a tweet and coming back to it later all while not crowding the actual bookmark tab.

Yash Saboo of Pepper Content commented on my Instagram post about this story that: "Liking a post in the DM should reflect on the original post. That’s actually a good feature to add on social media platforms," he said. To the point about privacy of 'likes' via DMs, he added, "Maybe the metric can be tracked differently. Instagram shows how many people shared the post on DM. Adding on it, it can show how many people reacted via the DM route anonymously. It’s a very specific metric to look at."

Here’s a fantastic essay from The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson on how inventions are necessary but not sufficient for making progress

When you add the anti-science bias of the Republican Party to the anti-build skepticism of liberal urbanites and the environmentalist left, the U.S. seems to have accidentally assembled a kind of bipartisan coalition against some of the most important drivers of human progress. To correct this, we need more than improvements in our laws and rules; we need a new culture of progress.

Here’s The Roots of Progress’ Jason Crawford’s response to the above piece in agreement :

The first iteration of an invention is generally just good enough to be practical, but far below optimal: there are decades of incremental improvements that get it to what we know today. Edison’s light bulb was not as bright or long-lasting as today’s bulbs.

Often there is a whole system that needs to be built up around the invention. It wasn’t enough to invent the light bulb, you also needed the generators and the power grid.

Such a system not only has to be invented, it has to be scaled. Scaling up from a prototype to a large, efficient, reliable system is its own challenge. Again with the power grid, it was a big challenge to figure out how to efficiently serve large regions, do load balancing, etc. With railroads, there was a challenge in figuring out how to manage a schedule with many trains and routes. With the telegraph and later the telephone, a system had to be invented to route messages and calls.

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