Death from a thousand careless wounds.
As is often the case with Musk, our predictions were for naught: Twitter did die this year, but the way it happened was both more dull and more foolish than anyone could have imagined. When Elon Musk first took over Twitter, those of us in the tech media had all kinds of theories about how the acquisition might bring about the death of the 17-year-old platform. Some suggested that his inept attempts at cost-cutting would cause irreparable damage to Twitter’s infrastructure or that mass resignations would lead to catastrophic instability.
Though you can still visit www.twitter.com and see a website that vaguely resembles the thing we used to call Twitter, it is only a dull echo of what it once was. Musk killed Twitter by gradually rendering it useless for those who relied on it for real-time information, by cutting off conversations from those who were unwilling to pay, by flooding users’ timelines with spammy blue-check sycophants, and by renaming the company X.
The start of the end
While one could argue that the platform we all knew started to die three months later when Musk suddenly decided to bar third-party client apps from its platform and hide the remainder of its API behind an absurdly expensive paywall, you could also argue that the death spiral started the moment Musk entered Twitter’s headquarters carrying a sink fourteen months prior.
For a considerable amount of time, Twitter stood apart from its competitors in the social media space because of its relatively open platform, which allowed researchers to access the complete history of all public conversations on the network and allowed developers to create their own apps on top of it, resulting in a small but active community of third-party Twitter clients.
Since Twitter did not have its own mobile app in the beginning, third-party developers set the standard for how the service should look and feel. Third-party apps were also often the first to adopt now-expected features like in-line photos and video, the pull-to-refresh gesture, and the word “tweet.” Additionally, these apps are responsible for popularizing Twitter’s bird logo and the relatively small (but devoted) following of Tweetbot and Twitterific.
Similarly, having an open and easily accessible API meant that Twitter, although not the largest social platform, could play an outsized role in shaping online culture; its firehose of data was easily accessible to researchers, and the public conversations that happened there fueled studies into everything from global elections to public health. And while many of these apps had become less prominent in recent years, they were emblematic of how, at its best, Twitter empowered its users to shape the platform.
Making Twitter’s API inaccessible to everyone but the wealthiest may not seem like even the tenth-most consequential change to happen under Musk, but it demonstrated just how willing he was to alienate influential communities on Twitter and was a major warning sign of what was to come. Almost a year later, Musk made it clear he was not interested in using Twitter for anything that could not make him a buck in the process by closing its API to developers and the research community.
Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2022
Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.
The controversy over the blue check
Twitter’s verification system was always flawed, but it hinged on the basic premise that the company had some evidence the accounts it verified belonged to the actual people claiming them and that those were people or organizations of some importance. When Musk rolled out his poorly thought out paid verification scheme last year, it went horribly and predictably wrong almost immediately because he failed to uphold any kind of identity check. If killing Twitter’s API was a quiet warning sign, then completely destroying Twitter “verification” was a five-alarm fire.
Even with the chaotic initial launch, verification’s current meaninglessness was not fully realized until this year, when Twitter started deleting “legacy” verification from thousands of accounts following a flood of thousands of spammers, scammers, and Musk acolytes signing up for it.
The verifiable accounts are given priority ranking in replies and search results, regardless of their following size or engagement — making Twitter even less relevant and useful — and the promise of potential ad revenue has incentivized the worst kind of engagement bait. These algorithmic boosts to the new paid-for wave of blue checks, along with the possibility of a potential share of ad revenue, have significantly changed the dynamics of conversation on Twitter.
As a result, fraudsters are increasingly employing pay-to-play verification to carry out schemes targeting customers attempting to reach legitimate customer support channels, and even the most meticulously maintained timelines are now cluttered with pointless spam.
X signifies the demise of Twitter
If you were to pinpoint the exact moment that Twitter died, it was in July, following Musk’s announcement that the firm would now be called X. Everything that had been connected to the bird app was abandoned, including the name and logo.
This was more than just a careless rebranding; for all Musk has said, this was about creating a “everything app,” it was also about completely severing any ties to the standards and expectations associated with Twitter. Want to break verification? Want to charge new users for the privilege of posting? Want to make news stories unreadable? Want to maliciously slow down links to competitors’ websites? X, a letter with which Musk has long been fascinated, represented, literally, the end of Twitter.It may have been against Twitter’s aim to re-platform the most abhorrent propagators of hate and conspiracy theories, but at X, it is just another Tuesday. CEO Linda Yaccarino told CNBC that “the rebrand represented really a liberation from Twitter.”
Although users appear uninterested in the somewhat random assortment of new features that have been introduced, such as live shopping and aggregating job listings, it remains unclear if Musk will ever succeed in creating anything approaching a “everything app” where users will be able to use X to run their “entire financial world.” What Musk has succeeded in creating, though, is reshaping the platform in his own image.
If there was any question left about whether the platform had a chance, Musk has virtually single-handedly destroyed Twitter’s ad business, as many of the company’s biggest remaining advertisers have stopped spending on the platform after supporting an antisemitic conspiracy theory and repeatedly failing to stop ads from appearing near pro-Nazi content.
As expected, Musk told the marketers to “go fuck yourself” in response, speculating that the company would “die” as a result of the loss of advertising revenue.Not only have advertisers left the increasingly toxic platform, but many of the largest and most popular accounts have also stopped posting in recent weeks. X’s infrastructure is also gradually collapsing, with sporadic features breaking all the time. All of this has only made the number of X competitors stronger, particularly the Meta-owned Threads app, which has surged to the top of Apple’s list of most-downloaded apps of the year despite its late summer launch. X, on the other hand, has seen steady declines in traffic and engagement.