Elon Musk!
A man who according to Forbes on June 9th 2023 was the new richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $220b.
A man who through Tesla and SpaceX was pushing the boundaries of technology to try and advance for the better of humankind.
This was a man who people thought would be hugely influential and given his net worth was thought of as incredibly business savvy and smart.
That was until he bought Twitter.
Let's not forget he put the bid in as a joke but once it got accepted, he realised "Oh crap, I've gotta go through with this now."
Over the first few months there were a lot of firings but funnily enough with those firings came an increase in glitches and issues.
While this was going on, Twitter, which Musk bought for $44b was rapidly losing value.
The much-vaunted Twitter Blue led to cries of "rip-off" especially down under where Australian users get screwed when it comes to currency conversion given the weakness of our dollar against the USD ($1AUD = $0.66USD).
Next, we had the rapid increase in advertisements being put on our timelines not to mention the disturbing increase in far right-wing accounts being returned to Twitter. Musk apparently wanted Twitter to be a place where ALL ideas could be shared and contested but allowing previously banned accounts back after they did some vile things, that was a bit much.
Now in his latest trick, Elon Musk has introduced "Rate Limits" on Twitter.
So if you believe this announcement, it is designed to stop data scraping and system manipulation; in other words, basically trying to stop AI in its tracks.
Following an outrageous and deserved amount of complaining, within 2 hours, Musk made another decision
This was still not much consolation to the angry Tweeters out there and still complaints continued to fly in. Three hours later we had this one come in from Musk
As always though, with decisions such as these, they quite often lead to unintended consequences and this is no exception.
First of all, these rate limits INCLUDE tweets that you scroll through. Now, for those who use Twitter heavily to keep up to date with the news and have to not only wade through crap that others post but also advertisements once every 4 posts, this spells big trouble. If you don't have Twitter Blue, you're basically either going to have to restrict the amount of time you spend on Twitter or basically, not post at all. Musk has just taken away from the user experience in a big way.
It is obvious to anyone out there that this is a decision purely made to try and encourage people to sign up for Twitter Blue but given how weak the Australian Dollar is against the US Dollar, it suddenly becomes a lot more expensive for us.
Sometimes profit-based decisions (despite what gets said otherwise) pay off while other times, it doesn't. This will be one of those times because of another unintended consequence.
The second and most important of the unintended consequences of this decision is that it will lead to a mass migration away from Twitter to other platforms that don't have the same crap going on that Twitter does.
Right now there are three platforms that are competing for these users though they don't necessarily know it as yet. These platforms are;
Mastodon
Spoutible
BlueSky
I don't think those who joined up with Musk to buy Twitter would necessarily be thrilled to find out that their user base is at risk of shrinking. Some people I'm sure will pay the money for Twitter Blue while those of us not as well off, probably won't and will be stuck with these "temporary" restrictions.
It's hard to know whether these restrictions will be lifted or whether something else will be decided which could make the user experience worse. Elon is being an unpredictable individual relying on these announcements to feed his ego and the person I feel most sorry for out of this mess; new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino.
Whatever way you look at this sorry weekend on Twitter, it is safe to say at this point in time that Elon Musk has taken what was a solid platform and turned it into a dumpster fire that could be on its last legs and all this because of a dumb decision from a supposedly "smart" individual.
Comments