Tag Archives: Twitter

Declaring victory on my Twitter prediction, conceding defeat on self-driving cars

I’ve made a few predictions over the years here, and I want to talk about two of them.

I’m declaring victory in saying that 2022 was *not* the Year Twitter Died. It was an extremely broad opinion in the left-of-center spaces that Musk was a terrible CEO, that firing so much Twitter staff would destroy the company, that it would be dead and overtaken very soon. I can concede the first one, the second two are clearly false.

The evidence from history has shown that firing most of Twitter’s staff has *not* led to mass outages, mass hacks, or the death of twitter’s infrastructure. It may seem like I’m debating a strawman, but it’s difficult to really convey the ridiculous hysteria I saw, with some claiming that Twitter would soon be dead and abandoned as newer versions of most popular browsers wouldn’t be able to access it. Likewise it was claimed that the servers would be insecure and claimed by botnets, and would thus get blocked by any sane browser protection. None of that has happened, Twitter runs just as it did in 2021. It is no less secure and it not blocked by most browsers.

Nor has the mass exodus of users really occurred. Some people think it has because they live in a bubble, but Mastodon was never going to replace Twitter and Bluesky is losing users. And regardless of your opinions on that, the numbers don’t lie.

I’ve said before that I used to be part of a community that routinely though Musk’s sky was falling. Every Tesla delay would be the moment that *finally* killed the company, every year would be when NASA *finally* kicked SpaceX to the curb, every failed Musk promise would *finally* make people stop listening to him. You’ve heard of fandoms, I was in a hatedom.

But I learned that all of that was motivated reasoning. EVs aren’t actually super easy, and that’s the reason Ford and GM utterly failed to build any. It’s not that Musk was lucky and would soon be steamrolled by the Big Boys, Musk was smart (and lucky) and the Big Boys wet their Big Boy pants and have stilled utterly failed in the EV market despite billions of dollars in free government money.

Did Musk receive free government money? Not targeted money no, any car company on earth could have benefited from the USA/California EV tax credits, it’s just that the Detroit automakers didn’t make EVs. Then they got handed targeted free money, and they still failed to make EVs.

NASA (and the ESA, and JAXA, and CNSA) haven’t managed to replicate SpaceX’s success in low-cost re-usable rockets sending thousands of satellites into orbit. So now *another* Musk property, Starlink, is the primary way that rural folk can get broadband, because Biden’s billions utterly failed to build any rural broadband.

And of course while Musk has turned most of the left against him, he has turned much of the right for him, which is generally what happens when you switch parties. And now that he’s left Trump, some of the left want to coax him back. Clearly people still listen to him even if you and I do not.

So I was very wrong 10 years ago about Elon Musk being the anti-Midas, but I learned my lesson and started stepping out of my bubble. I was right 3 years ago when I said Twitter isn’t dying, and everything I said still rings true. Big companies still use Twitter because it’s their best way to mass-blast their message to everyone in an age when TV is dying and more people block ads with their browser. The same reason people prefer Bluesky (curate your feed, never see what you don’t want to see) is the same reason Wendy’s, Barstool Sports, and Kendrick Lamar prefer Twitter. They want their message, their brand, to show up in your feed even if you don’t want to see it. It’s advertising that isn’t labeled as an ad.

So that’s what I was right about, now I’m going to write a lot *less* about what I was wrong about, because I hate being wrong.

I was wrong about how difficult it would be to get self-driving cars on all roads. In 2022 I clowned on a 2015 prediction that said self-driving cars would be on every road by 2020. Well it’s 2025, and I’ll be honest 5 years late isn’t that terrible.

At the time I thought that there was a *political-legal* barrier that would need to be overcome: how do you handle insurance of a self-driving car? No system is perfect and if there’s a defect in the LIDAR detector or just a bug in the system, a car *can* cause damage. And if it does, does Google pay the victim, or the passenger, or what? Insurance is a messy, expensive system, split into 50 different systems here in America, and I thought without some new insurance legislation (such as unifying the insurance systems or just creating more clarity regarding self-driving cars), that the companies would realize they couldn’t roll these out without massive risk and headaches.

I was wrong, I’ve now seen waymos in every city I’ve been to.

So it seems the insurance problems weren’t insurmountable, and the problem was less hard then I thought. You can read my thoughts about how hard I *thought* those problems were, but to be honest I was wrong.

Preemptively declaring victory on the “will Twitter die” prediction

It’s a new year, and with twitter still operating as usual I’d like to preemptively declare victory on my prediction that Twitter will not die in the next year. I’ll still have a full update on the 1 year anniversary of that post, but I think we have had enough time to at least take stock of things.

First I’d like to lay some ground rules. There was definitely a lot of misplaced hyperbole surrounding Elon Musk’s purchase of twitter. A number of articles about how the platform was dying, or unsafe. Some semi-major journalism outlets like CBS news even left twitter (for about a day, before rejoining). But a common defense mechanism for people who are publicly wrong is the “I was only joking” defense aka Schrodinger’s douchebag. I want to be clear that a lot of organizations like CBS were definitely acting like twitter would implode any minute, and so it’s important to note why these people were very wrong and what we can learn from this.

First note: is twitter dying because advertisers are fleeing it? Hard to say because advertisers are fleeing all companies right now. Advertisers fleeing Facebook (in the midst of a pandemic-related recession) didn’t stop that company from reaching a valuation of 1 trillion not long after, so stories about certain advertisers fleeing twitter aren’t really informative. At any time, with any company, you can always find some advertisers fleeing a platform, sometimes it says a lot more about the advertisers (losing money, can’t afford) than the platform (still growing). Considering the fact that the US economy is still not doing good (growth is expected to be zero or negative in 2023), then it’s natural that advertisers are fleeing twitter just as they are fleeing google advertisement. So without evidence that more advertisers are fleeing Twitter than are currently fleeing google and Facebook/Meta, then we can’t declare the death of twitter any more than we can declare the death of the other tech giants.

Second note: did twitter’s codebase collapse? Not at all, it still works fine. In the wake of thousands of firings of software engineers, some asked whether the software that underpins twitter wouldn’t collapse soon after. This seems like a farcical suggestion to me, a well run company should only put software into production if the code is ready for prime-time. If the code needs daily maintenance to sustain basic functionality, then it should be in testing not in the hands of users. The suggestion that twitter would collapse soon after it’s exodus of engineers was implicitly a suggestion that the company was a dumpster fire of near-unworkable code prior to Musk’s purchase. More puzzling was that it was former engineers making these claims. I get that they were unhappy to lose their jobs and there was likely a lot of emotions running high, but if you’re implying that the code you previously were responsible for was a dumpster fire that barely hung together, then I don’t know what company would want to hire you afterwards. Most tech companies try to have higher standards.

It’s too early to tell if twitter truly is dying, we’ll have better data next year on user totals and engagement. Certainly Musk’s freewheeling personality could be scaring off both advertisers and users, but some could also be drawn to it like a car crash. Whatever the eventual result, it’s clear that the short-term predictions of doom were widely off the mark (just as I said previously)

Why do people still use Twitter?

This is a short thought today, since it’s mostly jumping off my last post about Twitter. But with Twitter again in the news since their CEO is addicted to limelight, I figured I’d pontificate about why I think Twitter worked and may continue to work as a prestigious social media site despite proclamations of doom coming from every angle.

Note that I did say prestigious social media company. Some may turn up their noses, but Twitter was and still is the social network of choice for many companies to broadcast their content globally. Most companies wouldn’t be caught dead on Reddit, and Facebook doesn’t really enter into the social fabric as it once did, but the things that happen and are posted about on Twitter continue to drive endless news cycles, even when it’s not about Elon Musk, and companies want to take part in that conversation to direct it for their own ends. Companies and fame addicted continue to broadcast themselves on the Twitter, even as some of them start contemplating an escape route, but I don’t think one will be easy to find because nothing really replicates what Twitter is. Not Mastadon, not Post, not Substack, there is not a single social media site that is just “Twitter without Elon Musk.”

Twitter allows users to broadcast their message in ways that no other social media site does. While other sites do let you spread your message through posts and links, Twitter lets any and every user view your content if you attach yourself to multiple avenues of “trending topics” either with a hashtag, a phrase, or just putting yourself in the middle of a thread that’s trending. If you want people to see you, just look at the sidebar for what’s tending and try to put that somewhere in your tweet, the algorithms will find you and anyone searching the trending topics will see your tweet. If enough of them see and like your tweet, your tweet itself may trend and be made visible at the bottom of entirely unrelated tweets. Compare that to any other social media, the easiest example is Reddit which is a walled garden at the best of times: if you want people to see you there is no way at all to broadcast yourself to the entire Reddit community. At best you can join a highly popular subreddit and try to post in the highly upvoted threads, but even then you’re only speaking to a specific community in a specific thread. People in the r/cutekittens community will never ever see your epic takedown of Ron Desantis if you posted it in r/politics, and people in r/politics will never see your favorite fuzzball because you posted it in r/cutekittens. The moderators of the subreddits ensure that their communities stay “on topic” and thus separated from each other by a wall that can’t be breached. By contrast someone scrolling through @cutekittenpics will always see the trending topics on their sidebar, and your epic takedown of Ron Desantis may be trending there, putting the cat-scroller just a click away from seeing you.

Back to the moderators, Twitter is much more of a free-for-all than other social media. Of course there are rules and moderators will ban you if you break them, but the Twitter moderators are for lack of a better word more “professional” than most social media mods not least because Twitter mods are paid. By in large Twitter’s broad guidelines are but lightly enforced (especially now that Twitter is understaffed). Compare that to a subreddit where a volunteer moderators will ban you for no better reason than they’re on a power trip, or Mastodon where high-school level drama can get you banned from communities for being part of the wrong clique. Very little gets you banned from Twitter for any length of time. Just because you acted like a dumbass, or held extremist opinions, or just outright hate authority, you will still likely be able to tweet into the void for as long as you want so long as you don’t repeatedly violate their very very low standards of conduct. You can be infamous on Twitter but it’s very hard to be silenced, even before Elon Musk took over some of worst lightning rods in popular discourse kept their names alive on Twitter long after a Mastodon or Reddit admin would have banned them.

It’s not well appreciated, but these two factors; light touch moderation and ability to broadcast, go hand in hand as part of Twitter’s MO. Because no one is able to control the discourse the way a moderator would, companies and individuals feel free to set up shop and broadcast their message since they can’t be silenced by a cranky or drama-prone mod. And because every type of competing message is being broadcast at all times, Twitter becomes window into the “now” of society, a look at all those things being talked about right now but which may or may not still be important in a week. This window into the “now” draws in journalists, activists, and others who feed on discourse. The producers of discourse (companies, politicians, socialites) get attention, which they think will help them with whatever their goal is. The consumers of discourse (journalists, activists, socialites) get a window into the “now” which they think will help them with whatever their goal is. Note that many Twitter users are both producers and consumers of discourse, and I use the word “socialites” to demarcate anyone and everyone who enjoys or spends their time talking about society and humans in general (that includes most of us!).

This kind of firehose of social discourse, where everyone’s messages are constantly competing for views and clicks, is not replicated on any other social media that I know of. Some social media is heavily moderated, where the moderator gets to decide the narrow alley of what discourse is allowed (politics vs cute kittens) or of which views are allowed (right, left, center, etc). Other social media is heavily siloed, so even unmoderated discourse can’t spill out into each user’s individual walled garden. There really is nothing quite like Twitter at this point in time, and to me that explains why the vast majority of its users are sticking with the platform even while many of them dunk on the current owner and bemoan the downfall of their favorite timesink. I wonder what historians will write about all this in a hundred years’ time?

I don’t think Twitter is dying

You can stop tweeting #RIPTwitter

Over this past week, Twitter has gotten weird. Reports flying that Musk fired literally everybody, that there’s no engineers managing the servers, that he demanded everyone work 80 hours or quit and most of them quit. Forgive me for not posting sources but most of this is ultimately unsourced info from social media anyway. Regardless, people on Twitter are tweeting up a storm about how this is The End of Twitter and how they’ll all move to Facebook or Instagram or Mastodon when Twitter inevitably goes down for good. I don’t think that’s going to happen, at least not for another year or more.

Twitter may lose some of userbase as its billionaire owner continues to go crazy, but I highly doubt it will be replaced all at once, or even in the next year, or so and for a few reasons:

  • 1.) Lack of alternatives

When MySpace lost the battle to Facebook, it was a true battle between two platforms that did mostly the same thing. Both were neck and neck in terms of usercount and both focused on very similar styles of content and posting. Twitter doesn’t have that problem, Facebook and Instagram are nothing like Twitter in terms of its microblogging content or its ability to spread content to every corner of the userbase by latching onto its trending topics. And Mastodon has a tiny fraction of the total usersbase, if it continues to grow every year and Twitter loses half its userbase every year, then in around 5 years they’ll be neck and neck like Myspace and Facebook were in 2008. Until I see a sustained long-term trend of that nature, I’m not ready to proclaim that This Is The Death Of Twitter.

  • 2.) Institutional Buy-In

Twitter gives institutions something that they really really want, the ability to spread their message easily to all its users at almost no cost. There’s a good reason that Justin Trudeau, his holiness The Pope, and the People’s Daily (most read newspaper in China) all have official active accounts on twitter. Most would never be caught dead on Reddit in an official capacity, and Facebook/Instagram/other sites don’t allow them to reach every user in the way that Twitter does. Even if everyone with a net worth under 1 million dollars left Twitter TODAY, the site would likely continue on the inertia from Institutions for quite some time, as they would find tweeting something and having it get picked up by other institutions (especially newspapers) would still be a great way to get their viewpoint out into the wider world. Institutions don’t change rapidly, and even if Twitter does die it could take years for many institutions to migrate off of it. And the key is that as long as those institutions remain on Twitter, Twitter will still have value to many different users. Users who like to troll politicians’ comments, or bloggers/journalists looking to keep up with what the institutions are putting out, these people will stay on Twitter as long as the institutions stay on Twitter. So even if you start posting your dog pictures solely to Instagram, I doubt the Washington Post newsroom will abandon Twitter any time soon.

  • 3.) The Court of Lord Musk

People like to see billionaires as unaccountable god-kings creating or destroying everything in their path. This is partly because that is the image most billionaires cultivate and partly because they are certainly held less accountable than those of us who work for a living. But Musk isn’t the sole proprietor of Twitter, or even the sole proprietor of Musk Enterprises. There are a legion of accountants, lawyers, and investors who check and double check his every move. It seems strange that a man flaunts both the SEC and slander laws is being checked and double checked, but the very fact that he has never been punished for what he’s done is a testament to the work of his lawyers, accountants, and investors. These intermediaries act as a moderating influence on Musk the auteur CEO and so will likely ensure that no matter what he does the bills will keep getting paid and the lights will stay on at Twitter Enterprises.

  • 4.) Ease of use

Twitter has already been integrated into just about everything imaginable. I only have a Twitter handle (@streamsofconsc) to tweet out my daily blog posts. But WordPress (and basically every other posting software) has made it super easy to link your Twitter handle to your blog and auto-post everything you do with no added work necessary. Mastodon isn’t integrated into this ecosystem and probably won’t be any time soon.

  • 5.) I’ve seen this game before with Musk

This is a bit personal, but I’ve predicted the downfall of Musk before myself. I was part of the Musk hate-culture in r/enoughmuskspam for a fair bit, and fell easily into the echo chamber which pushed a narrative where Musk was constantly on the edge of destruction. I eventually got out, but it made me realize how easily hatred and castigation get amplified in such an echo chamber. Twitter is currently a strong echo chamber declaring the death of the platform and the End of Musk, and since there’s no social benefit to going against the grain, the most hyperbolic and outrageous claims of destruction are shared and amplified. This reminds me all too much of the patterns I saw with the hate-culture surrounding previous Musk ventures, and it makes me skeptical about people’s claims for this one.

I don’t think Twitter will go down because Musk fired too many of the people doing server maintenance. I don’t think Twitter will be replaced by Mastodon within the next few years. I don’t think Musk will be charged with market manipulation or treason for how he’s purchases a major avenue of public speech and trashed it. And I don’t think the people who are declaring the death of Twitter today will ever look back and admit they were wrong (if they are indeed proven wrong) any more than the people who declared the death of Tesla back in 2018 or the peak-oilers of the early 2000s. I think most people will either forget entirely or will claim that they were “early, but not wrong,” eternally pushing back their predicted death-date as they get more and more wrong by the year.

I may be wrong on this, and I’ll try to revisit this post in a year or so to either give my mea culpa or to declare how much smarter I am than everyone, but at this point I’d happily take the gamble that Twitter won’t be dying any time soon.