Twitter under Elon Musk is dying slowly and tediously – 3/6/2023 – Tech

If Elon Musk is right about Twitter being crucial to the future of civilization, then things look bleak for all of us. Outages are mounting, advertising revenues are down, and a company that had a workforce of 7,500 just four months ago now employs just 2,000 after yet another round of job cuts.

When Musk took over the social media platform in October, the sometimes richest person in the world said he wasn’t doing it to make money, but to “try to help humanity”. He was determined to improve Twitter, he said, because it was “important to the future of civilization to have a digital public square where a wide range of theories can be discussed in a healthy way.”

Lately, I haven’t seen Musk engage in much serious debate — healthy or otherwise — although I have seen him posting a bunch of third-rate memes and re-sharing his own bad jokes. I wonder, too, if someone who would have 80 engineers tweak the algorithm so that his tweets are more visible than those of the President of the United States really is the person who will be able to save Twitter and (he says) the rest of us.

In a way, however, all this is beside the point. I never expected that Musk, when he took over Twitter, would suddenly resist the urge to crack silly jokes, or stop irresponsibly making baseless claims to his 130 million followers, or to refrain from using the platform for his own personal gain. Nor did I expect him to be able – or willing – to allow unrestricted freedom of expression on the platform.

Also, Twitter is more like a horrible open mic night than a “digital plaza,” so the idea that Musk could somehow use it to bring us together has always struck me as a bit preposterous. What I really hoped was that Twitter would simply continue to be as bad and as good as it was before Musk took over.

But in the four months since the acquisition, the platform appears to have deteriorated. It’s not so much, at least for me, that the content has become more offensive, or more aggressive, or more false. It’s not even the usual technical glitches — like the broken timeline many users encountered when they visited the site on Wednesday. It somehow feels like a less exciting place than it used to be; it just seems a little… tedious.

In an attempt to understand whether that view was broader, this week I took a Twitter poll to see how people thought the platform had changed — or not — in the four months since Musk bought it. I gave four possible answers (which admittedly may have been slightly negative), guided by what I had seen and heard people say about him: “It’s much, much worse”; “It’s marginally worse”; “Improved! Freedom of speech, my dear!” and, finally, “I didn’t notice a difference”.

After 24 hours, the results arrived. Of the more than 2,000 people who voted, only 6% said Twitter had improved since the Musk acquisition, with just over 17% saying they hadn’t noticed any difference. That means more than three-quarters of respondents felt it had gotten worse: 31% opted for “much, much worse,” and the largest group, 46%, said Twitter had gotten slightly worse.

This is my experience too. Twitter is becoming a less interesting product. In addition to all the glitches, bugs and outages, the user experience has noticeably diminished. The algorithmically selected “For You” tab that Musk launched in January looks more like other social media platforms — lots of photos, videos and other viral content that can be a little addictive, but also completely lacking in substance. We already have Instagram for that.

Twitter has also stopped allowing third-party apps – which have been an integral part of the user experience and Twitter’s own development – ​​to freely access its data, which means most of these apps are now defunct.

And even though there seem to be a lot more ads coming in than before, many advertisers have fled, causing a drop in revenue. It looks like users might be doing the same: according to data intelligence firm SimilarWeb, total Twitter traffic was down 2% year-on-year in January. The full data set for February is not yet available, but in the 28 days to February 25th, traffic was down 5%.

It may have seemed invincible at one point, but Twitter couldn’t last forever — the network effect that kept us all on the platform until now would always give way to another network at some point. When the death of Twitter finally comes, we won’t be able to put all the blame on Musk. We can, however, blame it for making the social network so tedious.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves