I have had a Twitter account now for probably ten years and I have not made a post on it in two weeks and plan to never post on it ever again. There is more to this than Elon Musk, but a decision I made after doing a cost benefit analysis of what I get out of Twitter, and then a conviction to try to do something better in the financial space, where a lot of stock traders spend a lot of time wasting away on Twitter, which is a virtual ghetto.
First, yes, Elon did provoke me into starting to think about things.
He is making a mess of Twitter, but it caused me to ask bigger questions, because Twitter already was a mess without him.
On one hand he made me realize that Twitter simply isn’t really any fun.
Whenever you load it up you typically see streams of nasty comments people make on there about one thing or another.
Twitter encourages people to turn themselves into trolls for attention, and so many people decide to do that to themselves, even if it damages their own credibility, so hungry they are for any attention, even if it is bad attention.
They see people with a big following do it, so they do it themselves, and it is what the algorithm wants.
The Twitter trolls feel empowered, but they are conformists, always contorting for the algorithm.
Elon is also acting as a big troll, as he is the “head Tweet” and seeing some of his crazy Tweets in the past two weeks make me think this situation is just going to get worse as his sycophants and followers will seek to mimic him.
Consider these two he made.
The first is in reply to some Elon fanboy.
Thank you.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2022
A thermonuclear name & shame is exactly what will happen if this continues.
Ok, I have spent money advertising on various platforms for twenty years now.
Most of the time it doesn’t work well, and you have to run lots of tests and try different things to get advertising to work on the internet.
I see nothing wrong with a company or person deciding that they no longer want to advertise on Twitter.
So, trying to bully people into advertising is nuts.
But, worse is this tweet, as it kind of symbolizes everything that is wrong with Twitter and social media in general.
How times have changed pic.twitter.com/gCxUkZ4kZC
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 7, 2022
What is Musk trying to say here?
I don’t know, but when I look at it closely to me it symbolizes his vision of what he is trying to do with people and that is to lock them into a Twitter cage like a prisoner.
On the face of it I have no problem with getting people to make a payment to be “verified” with a “blue check.”
If you have a website or internet service that allows people to sign up at will you can end up with a problem of people joining, getting their account deleted, after doing something bad, and then joining up again with a fake account. Maybe getting people to use a credit card to join would stop that, but that’s not the real reason he is setting up this payment to get the blue check mark system.
Despite what he said inititally, its about revenue and survival of Twitter as a company, after his buyout of it.
That’s why it’s to be billed monthly and last week Musk said on a conference call that eventually those that do not pay will have their visibility and the Twitter feed taken away.
So, Twitter is moving to a pay to play system.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter he acted like a corporate vulture and made the Twitter company take on billions of new debt to buy out shareholders. He didn’t just buy the company with his own money, so now Twitter’s costs have exploded to finance this debt.
If you don’t believe it, here is quote from the WSJ: “The only viable solution to Twitter’s revenue challenges is a “paywall for prominence” that will lead to feeds that consist overwhelmingly of paid subscribers, or verified accounts, Mr. Musk said.”
I have a problem with that, because the way I see it when it comes to these social media companies the users are creating all of the content for them for free.
I am not going to PAY money to work for Elon Musk or his Twitter company.
The very notion makes me angry, as Elon has been one of the most unsavory people in the financial markets over the past ten years and holds up the robot and algorithm as superior to humanity. All his talk of “free speech” is a facade.
The deal is companies like Facebook and Twitter would make nothing without all the content people make for them for free.
Elon wants people to pay him to be his slave he carries on his back, living inside a cage, like the above picture.
I am not going to do it.
I’m sure there are serious Elon fanboys that will, but it’s up to you what you decide to do for yourself if you have been a Twitter user.
If you stay, though, I would worry that in a few months you’ll see Twitter get a lot worse than it already is.
The ugly truth is that, after a few waves of people leave, if the algorithm is tweaked to intensify the trolling and anger generation already inherent in the design of Twitter that it will create remaining users who can be easily guided and manipulated by Musk. The emotional stress may not be a bug of Twitter, but a feature of the system he will actually magnify. People thinking they are in a “free speech” parlor would then instead be in a version of virtual hell itself, much as the Metaverse is – and why it has failed – but Twitter addiction is more viable than the Metaverse addiction, which has turned out to be a failed concept. Musk simply is seeking what Zuckerberg’s Metaverse failed to achieve for that company.
Maybe Twitter will go the way of Myspace now. The headlines for it and story details are troubling:
The Six Biggest Takeaways From Musk’s Groveling Call With Twitter Advertisers – The Daily Beast
Twitter Buyout Loans Get Bid at 60 Cents as Banks Sound Out Investors – Bloomberg
Musk warns of Twitter bankruptcy as more senior executives quit – Yahoo Finance
I’ve already used Twitter’s $8 ‘verification’ to trick people – Business Insider
Mark Cuban Slams Elon Musk Twitter Verification Plan: ‘A Nightmare’ – Variety
The Age of Social Media Is Ending – The Atlantic
There was a time before social media that the internet was fun and it can be fun again.
As far as a cost benefit analysis, I went and did a study of the traffic to my website and found that I get almost zero hits to it from Twitter, despite having made one or two Tweets just about everyday on there for years.
This is a screen shot of the amount of hits I have gotten from the different social media sites in the past 30 days:
Sixty-seven hits from Twitter over 30 days is not worth my time or effort to even load it up and take the psychological energy to look at all of the negative nonsense on there.
Compare that with over 5,000 from hits Facebook, much of which is from people sharing a few key articles I wrote with others via messenger.
I have spent enough time on Twitter over the years that looking at this made me wonder why I ever did it and even question how much of what I do on the internet is simply a waste of time, participating in an illusion of “free speech.”
When looked at this from a cost benefit analysis I decided that I am not going to post on Twitter anymore.
Out of my frustration with Twitter – I am going to try to do the opposite of Elon Musk.
I want to improve the content of WallStreetWindow and get a few more writers.
But, instead of asking for people to work for free, I’m going to invite them to share in almost all of revenue that any posts they make generates!
I will do the opposite of the social media companies and run counter to the Twitter “principles” of Elon Musk.
In fact, instead of a cage, I’m going to try to make it so that their posts don’t just get seen here, but are distributed elsewhere to truly amplify their speech.
I will have more on this in a post later as I develop this..
If you are not on my free email list then you need to get on it get my morning news digest, which will include a link to that post.
To subscribe for free click here.
-Mike
If you have any thoughts leave them in the box below.
