Few people appear to have recognised that Musk's intention to "prioritise paying users in replies, mentions and search" would equate to a soft shadowban for everyone else.
Who would have imagined, this time last year, that the latest global crisis in autumn 2022 would be a bitter bleating match over who gets to have a ball-bearing-sized blue badge next to their name on an Internet forum? The row, to which I'm colloquially referring as blue-tickgate, has been sparked within the first week of Elon Musk's tenure as Twitter boss, after the multi-billionaire mogul Tweeted this...
" Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit.
Power to the people! Blue for $8/month"
The Tweet headlined a thread, which contained the far more important statement...
"You will also get:
- Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam"
Few people appear to have recognised that - in the long term if not immediately - this would equate to a soft shadowban for everyone who doesn't pay the subscription charge. I'll come back to the implications of that shortly, but the way Musk introduced it was very nearly a marketing masterstroke. Focusing the platform's loudest voices on their own widdle bwue tick pwoblems, rather than the impending disaster of turning Twitter into a wall-to-wall vanity publishing site, was pretty shrewd. While the "lords" and "peasants" are arguing about ball-bearing-sized badges, Musk quietly replaces real, street-level conversation with a glut of monetised, spamming drones. Had AOC not blanked his blue-tick-bait and attacked the hypocrisy of the scheme he was trying to hide behind it, he probably would have got away with it.
In the run-up to Elon Musk's acquision of Twitter, it was noticeable that the more people loved or hated him, the more delusional they were about his real motivations. Both extremes thought he saw Twitter as a political tool. But if they haven't already, they're now about to discover that he sees Twitter the way any other entrepreneur sees a tech platform: as a financial investment. Currently, it's about nothing more than a dude who committed $tens of $billions to an impulsive purchase and then wished he hadn't, getting his money back.
Will he do so? It's not looking good so far. Ad revenue has plunged since the takeover, and whilst some of the decline is likely to be restored if the new Twitter regime can establish some "brand safety" confidence in the coming weeks, a dramatic drop is clearly a bad sign. If brands can live without Twitter ads now, they can live without them in future.
Already, we're seeing signs that that the bull-in-a-china shop approach which has brought Musk success elsewhere could prove catastrophic at Twitter. His one salvation at the present time is that Twitter has no true equivalent, and that, for now, retains him a userbase, if not a healthy ad revenue. There are platforms that look like Twitter and have superficially similar features. None of them, however, serve the purposes Twitter serves, and that monopoly gives Musk some margin for error - as well as some licence to push users' tolerance.
By far the greatest long-term danger to Elon Musk's Twitter is a mass exodus of celebrities and other attention-grabbers who fuel the attention mill. The platform could not survive that. But is it likely?...
If you wanna eliminate bots, block them. It really is that easy on a JavaScript app that sees a full behavioural fingerprint for every user and knows when events are coming from a real human. Musk does not wanna eliminate bots. He wants to charge bots to post. Let's be clear on that.
In the week since Musk took over, there's been a trickle of major account-holders vacating the platform. Some of the notables, however, had been re-evaluating their use of Twitter for other reasons, and would probably have walked anyway. Others have already resumed regular posting. A small minority of organisations and brands have ceased using Twitter altogether, whilst a much larger number have put their advertising on hold whilst reassessing the "brand safety" of the platform. Determining the risk of their adverts being associated with damaging content, basically.
But as regards the actual userbase, at scale, we've only really seen threats to date. And the fact that so many celebs threatened to leave when Musk took over, but have now changed their battlecry to "stay and fight!", will have given the world's richest man some confidence. He now knows that principles come second to comfort, and he knows public figures need Twitter (at least in its current state) as much as Twitter needs them. So this moves forward purely as a game of tolerance. That's a lifeline for Musk.
Things could, however, still rapidly go pear-shaped. We should remember that we're only a week into what's already become a rampant quest to exploit every last corner of Twitter as a revenue stream. Celebs won't care about that per se, but they will care about losing their audience and authority. Their authority is already being undermined by the blue tick saga, and their audience could dwindle if Twitter becomes too overrun with junk and annoyance.
Speaking of which, earlier this week, Twitter's Danny Singh (already a casualty of Musk's job-blitz) was sounding out a plan to monetise Direct Messages. Something like that would need incredibly careful and sensitive planning in order to avoid becoming a stalkers' and spammers' charter. The problem is, Elon Musk is not known for careful and sensitive planning. If perverts and brands are in any way at all able to spam random Twitter users for a fee, there's so much potential for disaster that I wouldn't know where to start.
Far from quelling spam, a guarantee of visibility for $8 per month will balloon the proliferation of worthless crap up to levels not seen since 2016.
There could also be delayed action consequences as Musk's pay-for-a-voice policy starts to prioritise those who are paying, over those who actually have something interesting, useful or funny to say.
Musk has claimed that his default soft shadowban will tackle the problem of spam. Reportedly, his rationale is based on the economic viability of running a bot network. If only the accounts subscribing to Twitter Blue are realistically visible in replies and search, it becomes financially prohibitive to spam the network. With Twitter Blue as currently specified, running a thousand realistically visible bots costs $8,000 a month. And that, says Musk's theory, is something spammers will not consider.
But digging beneath this superficial hoodwink, there's a glaring problem. If you have a bot with guaranteed visibility (which is exactly what the new Twitter Blue claims to offer), you don't need the other 999. Which means that botting the platform only costs $8 per month. Not $8,000. That is something spammers very much WILL consider.
Far from quelling spam, a guarantee of visibility for $8 per month will balloon the proliferation of worthless crap up to levels not seen since 2016. Unless they worship Musk, your average person in the street will not pay for a voice. But brands will pay. Crypto drones will pay. Scammers will pay. "Digital marketers" will pay. Anyone who anticipates an ROI will pay. Anyone who doesn't, won't.
So you have to ask: who is the source of the dynamic viral content that makes Twitter what it is? Is it crypto drones?... No. It's not. Is it "digital marketers"?... You know the answer to that. Do your research, and you'll see that nearly all of the best lines come from the person in the street. Often those lines are progressively tweaked, screengrabbed and/or re-published by bigger and bigger names until they finally go viral, but they still come from the same place. A place that will become hugely less accessible if Musk's default shadowban reaches its logical conclusion.
With a pay-to-be-seen policy, you're talking about wall to wall vanity publishing. Long term, you end up with a WHOLE PLATFORM of what's essentially paid placement. A WHOLE PLATFORM of spam. And although this doesn't directly affect the follow timeline at present, it will eventually osmose, as people begin to block the new era "blue ticks" as spam (oh come on, it's bound to happen eventually - most obvious rebel tactic in the book), and Twitter starts forcing them into new regions in a bid to boost their impressions to something worth paying for.
This doesn't work as a commercial model. There's no way you can make it work. Every single medium that has tried to feed an audience on vanity publishing has failed.
So this will have to go one of two ways. Either Musk honours his promise to visibly rank subscribing users (be they bots, Web3 evangelists or perverts) above non-subscribers, and people get sick of the spam and sod off - exactly as they did in 2016. Or else Musk continues to rank the best content highest, effectively ripping off the paying users he's claiming will get priority vis. I'm sensing that he's planning on the latter, in the hope that his mug-ass worshippers are so besotted with his fame and fortune that they accept their complete waste of money as some kind of sacrificial offering.
If the cost of staying rises above the cost of switching, a couple of key tweaks to Tumblr could change the game.
There are also dire implications for the voice of poverty, which is already disenfranchised to the hilt, and which will be further driven out of sight under a policy in which speech costs money. Not that anyone would expect a multi-billionaire to care or even think about that, obviously.
Journalism also suffers, since serious news outlets need access to the common voice in search, and they accordingly depend on... well, on the public majority not being driven down below every spamming moron with $96 a year to burn, basically.
Another unknown is the ultimate toll of Musk's mass firing extravaganza. Will a dramatic loss of staffing leave the platform at greater risk of being hacked? Will it affect the speed at which scammers and harassers can be de-mobilised? I think we can all agree that no global operation ever improved quality by canning half its workforce. So Twitter is not about to take a turn for the better. The only questions are how much worse it will get, and how the inevitable decline in service quality will align with users' tolerance.
The most surprising element in the past week's events is the speed at which Elon Musk is trying to get his money back. The classic Silicon Valley tactic is to "boil the frog". Notch up the discomfort by a couple of degrees every few months, so users can never directly compare the eventual wreck with the initial utopia. But at the current rate of progress, we could see a full-on wreck before Christmas. You can't boil a frog that quickly. It jumps out of the pan.
Rarely does a tech brand's success story end with a dramatic, fairytale protest. In the real world, people slowly exceed their tolerance threshold, attention drifts, and then publishers are forced to refocus on other venues. At the end of the day, publishers will publish wherever they can most easily reach their audience. If that were not the case, Twitter would never have taken off in the first place. And since Twitter is still something of a monopoly, with no direct alternative, there's currently no painless route out for celebrities and other notables.
But if the cost of staying rises above the cost of switching, a couple of key tweaks to Tumblr could change the game, and see a platform which has always been vastly superior to Twitter in technical terms, attracting a stampede of big names. If any significant momentum were to build in that direction, Twitter could not stem it under Elon Musk.
So it's over to you, Matt Mullenweg. Can you graft a "simple mode" into Tumblr before Elon Musk turns Twitter into OnlySpam? Hero status and a $44billion digital estate awaits... Oh, and you could also buy the remnants of Twitter for $3million sometime around 2026. What's not to like?