About six months ago, Elon Musk bought your favorite neighborhood bar. He then fired veteran doormen and bartenders, attempted to rip off the venue’s owner and at least one vendor, and demanded that regular customers start paying for an entree. He has often had trouble serving his customers, but still he has chastised them for mentioning the competition. For the most part, what he’s done is dampen the party: many conversations in his tavern have been drowned out by Musk’s own endless spectacle, which consists mostly of him yelling idiotic jokes at patrons through a megaphone.
Here’s to Twitter, then. I was receptive to Musk’s purchase of the social network, but after half a year, the truth is that it has been an absolute disaster. Musk moved fast and broke almost everything – the speed and completeness with which he has wrecked the site has been almost impressive. By Musk’s own calculations, the company is currently 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.
But more than that, Musk’s Twitter seems to have lost what made it impossible to give up on the social network: its centrality. The site used to be the most transcendental place online, not only a disseminator of breaking news and commentary, but also something of an arbitrator. At its cultural height, from about 2015 to maybe 2020, what people were commenting on Twitter seemed to set the agenda for discussions elsewhere. Even last year, it was still relevant: After years of mismanagement and a stagnation in innovation, Twitter, on the eve of Musk’s reign, was still the one place to go when something big was happening anywhere.
Whatever Twitter is now, it’s not that place anymore. Cultural relevance is hard to quantify, but you know it when you feel it. And now, when something happens, Twitter rarely feels like the place where everyone gathers to watch.
I realized this when Donald Trump was indicted. Trump, the most powerful Twitter user 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 yawn fest.” ”.
There could be many reasons for the yawning, including the fact that people care less about Trump than before, or that even after Musk reinstated Trump’s suspended Twitter account, the former president has decided to only use the platform he founded, Truth Social, for your special announcements.
But I bet a lot of the problem stems from the changes Musk has made to Twitter’s news feed.
These days, it’s often hard to know what’s going on on Twitter. Musk’s capricious changes to the site’s ranking algorithm have significantly reduced its functionality. Twitter used to be pleasingly mixed, displaying tweets from everyday people fairly evenly with those from celebrities and politicians. Now, it seems to target the same few users all the time. (I love your tweets, Matt Yglesias, but I wish you weren’t always at the top of my page!)
There are other signs of Twitter’s waning relevance: Several news organizations, including The New York Times, have said they won’t pay for Twitter Blue, Musk’s subscription service, to get a verified user badge on the site. NPR said it would stop posting to its official Twitter accounts because Twitter labeled it a “state-affiliated outlet” and then a “government-funded outlet.” PBS, which has also been labeled “government funded,” reported that it would also stop tweeting in protest of the label. (NPR is a nonprofit organization that receives very little government funding; the label, he says, undermines its credibility.)
Musk doesn’t like the media—Twitter’s PR email automatically responds with a poop emoji—but I don’t see how fighting the media could help his site. At the risk of sounding smug, media organizations are vital to Twitter because news is at the core of the site’s utility.
Musk has said Twitter’s algorithms won’t recommend unverified users in its “For You” section, and that the free verification badges—the blue marks both coveted and maligned—that many journalists have will soon be removed. That change will further reduce Twitter’s usefulness: if so many journalists are removed from the site’s main sources, why would people continue to see it as their main source of news?
As a long-time tweeter, Musk’s destruction of the service makes me sad and outraged. The employees and users of Twitter did not deserve this fate. In the hands of a less volatile and more thoughtful leader, Twitter could have been much more than the tattered fiefdom of a fragile billionaire he has become.
But as a person who wants to live in a fair world with friendly people and nice things, I’m not entirely depressed by the decline of Twitter. As I have argued on other occasions, Twitter has been a source of misinformation, an accelerator of polarization, and a contributor to cultural groupthink. Just before the Musk takeover, my Times colleague Michelle Goldberg, worried about similar problems, expected a quick and spectacular failure: “If Musk makes Twitter horrible enough,” she wrote, “users will flee and the social network it will become less relevant.”
Well, it looks like Michelle got her wish. Buy the coffin, Elon: Twitter is dead.
c.2023 The New York Times Company
