The Twitter Takeover Tumult
Twitter could be on the brink of breaking down or breaking through. It all depends on a few key factors.
Guys, I don't know if you know this about me, but I have had an addiction problem over the years. This addiction problem has racked me with so much grief at times and yet at the same time been the source of many nights of endless intrigue & entertainment. There are times where I find myself periodically looking at the source of my addiction not understanding or knowing what I'm even looking for. Yes, I know a lot of you have probably raised your eyebrow and maybe even now consider leaving this publication all together since I have sullied my once sterling image as a do-good Golden boy. Nonetheless, it has to be done. I have to tell you guys about my addiction to Twitter and why that matters.
Now I will preface this whole work by saying that I believe a lot of people who read this very publication also have a Twitter addiction. That's not to say that this is a bad thing because social media in its penultimate form is supposed to be an overly addictive time waster. The metrics, the numbers, the agreement, all of this stimulates endorphins and endorphins are purely the endogenously or naturally produced form of morphine which is addictive. Thereby, social media in its very code and construction is to create a positive feedback loop within the body that keeps individuals coming back to the platform in question for more hits of that sweet endorphin rush. All things considered, it does this very well but there are few social media companies who capture the feeling of achievement quite like Twitter. Twitter takes the nature of gamifying our daily interactions to a whole new level, which in-turn creates an achievement system and faction system that would put ones that you would find in any MMORPG to shame.
This isn’t even a logical leap, there are entire articles and strategies devoted to the practice of gamifying social media within a brand interface.
In the case of Twitter, a lot of this is already built into the interface itself. Think about it, you have clans or guilds of people who identify with the same topics that you do. You then these people and interact with them daily creating closer bonds even though they're about as real as that one annoying spot on your phone that has the burned-out pixels from that time you accidentally dropped it while walking to your door. Then when you find an adversarial person, you have the option of either trying to convince them to join your side or you and the boys go on a raid where you " ratio" them into silence. That sounds like a good old guild raid if I ever saw one. In addition to this, you have things known as followers which may as well be considered clout points because They are essentially a scoring system for arbitrarily gauging your worth within the larger world. You have some figures who have been playing the game who have massive amounts of followers in thereby have a theoretically high power-level based on clout. You even have the hackers or people who somehow went on a shady market and bought their clout points and thereby don't have the actual skill that a seasoned player like you who has grown your clout through endless raids and scoring properly through the meta of Twitter. And when you feel like you have done just enough to gain some power, you can test your mite against the various raid bosses or brands, celebrities, political figures, or journalists who draw your ire. Here, you will partner up with several other people who identify with a similar faction like you and have also decided to raid and ratio these Titanic pillars of corporate clout. A job well done here means that you and the boys can go back to your guild hideout and crack open a cold one as you celebrate your conquest right from your phone. I hope I haven't lost you with all this video game talk.
That being said, it's very easy to see how people have become addicted to Twitter and how it is basically turning into a source of rot within the society. For all the bad that Twitter does though, it also does great for purpose of organizing movements, creating initiatives, and launching previously unknown people into a limelight where their opinions can be seen by larger audiences and they can eventually begin to market ideas, products, services, or just their personality. These real-world implications add a new level of gravitas and importance to the once trivial game that we saw in Twitter and social media as a whole. It is for that reason that no one should feel ashamed of their social media addiction because it's more realistic that you will end up building sustainable wealth off of a social media platform than it is that you will win the lottery which jumped all the way up to 1.9 billion because people believed in it so much. That massive number means that there have been an infinitely high number of losers, yet people still play it En-masse despite the infinitesimally small chance of winning money and massive time waste to go get these tickets. So, no one should feel bad about trying to hit it big off of social media if that's your goal. Beyond the personal motivations of succeeding on Twitter, you have to also look at the motivations of sharing information and indulging in intellectual curiosity. Twitter is addicting for those who like you consume information at a rapid pace and in a frenetic manner as it is both rapid and frenetic itself. You see this chaos represented in their brand design choices where they try to paint this graffiti / taped off image on their sign-up page. There is an energy about the site which hasn't been unleashed properly in the last few years but may change under Elon.
For one, no business has survived going out and actively maligning its own customer base and making them feel as if they didn’t belong. That’s almost a death sentence, so with what we have seen in Elon reversing a lot of lifetime bans which seemed to happen at a whim, we’re currently witnessing a shift in sentiment, where Conservatives finally feel as if they belong / are welcome on the platform. That goes a long way to restore the image of a brand and increase revenue, but then there’s also the possibility of expanding the integrations of the app as well as the functionality. Those 2 will possibly breathe new life into a platform once thought to be a more interactive form of Wikipedia for journo bros. The main thing that Twitter needs more than anything is content and content creators. It can no longer be a den of screaming leftists with the purpose of displaying the latest assemblage of pronouns and having competitive reeing circles with the few conservatives left on the platform & still willing to debate them. The main bread and butter of thriving sites is having a base of creators that can continually pump out content which not only draws in traffic from sources to where the content is exported, but also hold the attention of those already on the platform. This is what apps like TikTok and Youtube have successfully done, and Elon seems to be well aware of this and with his noted ambitions to really turn the app into something akin to WeChat where the app essentially is an everything application, that’s the noted direction of the app.
Not everything is as good as it seems however, as there are some noted issues with Elon’s pursuit to take the app in a much better direction. One of these things, Elon had made specific note of upon successful acquisition of the company. He is pissing off both the Far Left and the “Far Right” for all intents and purposes or rather those ardent culture warriors on the right who eat, sleep, and breathe the conflict with the left. There are many people who have the belief that we need to be 100% free speech out the gates and while I am extremely pro-free speech myself, especially after having been subjected to onerous censorship, I realize that therein is difficulty in going from 0 to 100 real quick, as the kiddos would say. A large issue that you will have is that moving into the free speech territory requires quite a cultural change. This change has to come as a result of people adjusting to being able to say what they like and hear others do the same. The explicit problem with this? As a society we have moved so far into the deep end of coddling and day are mentality for our adults, where in most cases the authoritarians aren’t even defying the will of the people by censoring someone as the people themselves will call for censorship of others over paltry disagreement. In order for Elon to make his dreams of having a freedom of speech public square platform possible, he needs to be able to straddle a fine line that won’t send the advertisers and their sensitive decision-makers running for the hills.
With the return of many people who were wrongfully banned under some of the more egregious stretches of TOS that would sprain the soft-tissues of even the most accomplished yogi or contortionist, people were seeing red for a good minute with a lot of your least-favorite accounts threatening to leave. To name a few off the top of my head:
Bette Midler
Ron Perlman
Steven King
Brooklyn Dad Defiant
Angela Belcamino (I don’t know cringe dance girl’s name fully and don’t care to be corrected.)
Etc.
If you know anymore put them into the comments section.
This has caused an overarching perception that there is some unsafe element to allowing people to speak freely which created some bizarro world where you had article written exclaiming how freedom of speech would actually be destroyed under Elon Musk. (No, I wish I were kidding but I’m not.)
Again, this is just another example of the challenges and tumult that Twitter may be up against in trying to take off as the free-speech wing of social media. Nonetheless, even if Twitter faces massive push back from advertisers and financially can never recover given the fact that Elon owes 1 Billion in interest per year on the loans he took out, if Twitter files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy, they can simply reorganize and at that point, you’d get the investors swooping in to take control of the platform and actively shape it into a financially viable industry which would possibly allow Elon to rebuild some of those connections with advertisers who fled.
Its a glimmer of hope in at the end of a dark and stormy ocean of uncertainty for us as we are currently up against many different threats, some from the left and some even from the right (who wants the free speech) as most people saw with the Kanye West Saga coming to a head.
We’re going to need to tread carefully as missteps may lose us the one place that we now are starting to feel a little bit better about speaking our mind freely without fear of the overlords of that platform coming for us. It may not be perfect, but for the time being, its all we got. Now we must truly band together and do what we can to provide earnest feedback to Elon in hopes that he listens and can turn the “Town Square” around amidst all this Twitter Takeover Tumult.
Good read. Thank you