Structure 004: The Nonsense on Twitter

Welcome to this week's issue of Structure. As always, one topic, with the goal of providing you some extra insight into the themes you see online. If you enjoyed feel free to subscribe below!

*sigh*

I actually can’t believe I’m writing about this, but here we are. Content is content and man this situation has provided a lot of content. I’m a big Twitter user, so it’s been nothing short of impossible to use the platform without seeing a consistent stream of events related to the ongoings of Elon Musk. I’m going to start from the beginning in a minute to recap for anyone who hasn’t kept up with it, but the main theme here is that powerful people should Tweet less (please).

This whole fiasco started a few months ago when Elon jokingly started tweeting about buying Twitter. He ended up following through on the deal and ever since then, Twitter has become less of a news platform and more of a news story. We’ll start with a high level overview of events and I’ll leave my thoughts on this nonsensical situation we’ve found ourselves in recently.

Timeline

This will be a rough sequence of the events that got us to where we are now. I’ll leave the corporate inner workings to someone else, but from the POV of a Twitter end user here is how things went down.

This all started back in April 2022 when Elon started cracking some jokes online about buying Twitter. It was all fun and games for a few weeks until he actually ended up posting an offer for the company. After some back and forth it looked like the previous Twitter ownership group was going to dig their feet in the ground and resist this buyout like a hostile takeover. That did not last long. There were rumors of Elon wanting to back out of the deal at times, but by the time fall rolled around it was a done deal.

Throughout the buying process rumors were constantly circulating about Elon planning to cut over 70% of the workforce. I truly feel for the Twitter workers who basically had their employment status as one of the hottest topics in the tech world for months at a time. At one point Elon did address the rumors saying they were based on nothing.

Anyway Elon comes in and brings a significant workforce reduction plan with him. Massive layoffs start and the internet watches it happen step by step. Discussion begins online with a few dominating viewpoints. Either he is a genius for cutting off so much unnecessary weight from the company without any real drawbacks, or he is an imbecile who just lost an unfathomable amount of industry knowledge in one fell swoop. Some praise him for this move, arguing that tech companies have become bloated with workers in recent years. Others predict that Twitter will have a hard time staying afloat without so many key workers.

Twitter starts seeing some issues. Nothing gamebreaking, but notification glitches, timeline errors, and other small grievances begin to surface. Reports that Twitter began reaching out to fired employees to come back are confirmed by news sources. Not a great look. However, despite the issues Twitter remained usable, so the saga continues.

Internally, Elon emails the remaining Twitter staff asking for them to physically opt-in for the journey towards "Twitter 2.0". The message tells staff to prepare for grueling work hours and an intense work environment, but that if they believe in the product, they are welcome on the journey. If not, they will be terminated with severance.

Naturally, that ultimatum forces more employees out of the company. Then a few days later after a few performance reviews, more people are fired anyway despite opting in (no severance this time).

Throughout this period and especially after the journey to “Twitter 2.0” note, we start to see updates rolling out to Twitter. Small tweaks and aesthetic changes mostly, but also some policy changes. A paid subscription model was created for $8 a month including a verification stamp. This quickly led to a spike in misinformation and was put on hold for a few weeks. Anyone with $8 and an internet connection could troll the internet with a verified profile sticker, it was a very confusing few days online. Square profile pictures, a view counter on tweets, and more smaller tweaks slowly crept into the platform. Most of these updates were negatively received (from my POV), but they were all relatively low impact changes anyway.

The real trouble starts with Elon tweeting about how dedicated he is to preserving free speech on Twitter, citing that he allows the @Elonjet account to stay active despite the concerns it poses to his own security (the account used publicly available air travel data to post the status of where Elon was flying).

Shortly after this tweet, he suspended the account from the platform, citing security concerns. Naturally this was met with a lot of backlash and reporters across the country made sure to cover this topic. Elon then began suspending any account that seemed to promote the @elonjet including a few notable reporters. Naturally this was followed by more backlash.

One particularly unbelievable piece of this story was Elon joining a Twitter Space filled with reporters discussing these events, answering a few questions in a relatively cross manner, then abruptly leaving. Within the hour, most users then saw the Twitter Spaces functionality completely removed from the app.

The last example I’ll go through was a relatively unprovoked tweet from Elon saying that Twitter users were no longer allowed to promote other social platforms on the app. Anyone doing so would be banned. A notable figure in the tech and VC scene, Paul Graham saw this and expressed his frustration in a tweet including a link to his Mastadon profile (a budding social network). He was almost immediately banned. This resulted in some uproar amongst the tech Twitter community as Graham holds a significant amount of influence. Elon later apologized for his decision making and reversed the policy.

A few weeks later Elon posted a poll asking users if he should step down as Twitter CEO. The majority voted that he should, and now we have what seems to be the hunt for a new CEO.

Can’t wait to see how that goes.

Thoughts

I’ll start with the fact that a lot of the controversial policy changes Elon made were reversed or changed soon after implementation. Whether he posted a poll and asked users for their input, or made the call himself, Elon did seem to make a good will effort to keep the majority of users happy on the platform. That’s about all of the praise I’ll be giving Elon for his handling of his role as CEO of Twitter.

My first gripe is with the way he handled the layoffs. Layoffs unfortunately are a common cost-cutting business practice, so the issue is not with whether or not the cuts were necessary. The issue comes with the extended rumors he allowed to surface without being addressed, the lack of humanity in firing workers who gave up a chance at severance to work for him, and the lack of forethought that led to the company reaching out previously fired employees for help. All of that could have and should have been handled better.

Building in Public

As Twitter CEO, if Elon wants to enact policy changes or aesthetic changes that is obviously his right. He’s shown himself to be a fan of Twitter in the past and continued his usage heavily throughout this entire timeline. The “building in public” trend has picked up some steam in recent years particularly around the startup and creator communities. Founders or creators will make content out of the act of them building their company while providing insight for fans to follow along with. I’m personally a fan of seeing founders build in public. That said, I think the concept suits startups, creators, musicians, or anyone not managing what was a publicly traded company.

These massively impactful companies are too big and too important for their inner workings to be debated on by half the planet. Every rumor is impactful, misinformation is too hard to control, and the backlash that results simply can’t be worth the trouble. Not to mention the amount of people that rely on a company like Twitter to behave like a normal company. Moving fast and breaking things is a great way for startups to find their fit and start to impact markets. When you are the incumbent associated with thousands of derivate companies, users, and employees your moves need to be calculated. Calculated, debated, and discussed. People love to make fun of big companies for how long the decision making process usually takes, myself included. However, that process needs to be longer than that of a smaller company, way too much is at risk.

Elon constantly putting up Twitter polls debating policy changes, trying to ratio people, and posting snarky replies to people who disagree with him is not helping the company in any way. All it does is add additional pressure to a situation that already has enough. His heart may have been in the right place with trying to include the community on decisions, but unverified Twitter polls aren’t exactly the best medium to do so.

Please Stop Tweeting

I won’t pretend to have all of the answers, but I will say if Elon tweeted *less* throughout this process, a lot more people probably see him in a positive light. Maybe he's just like the rest of us and enjoys the interaction on Twitter, maybe when you have a following like his you feel the need to take advantage of it in ways others can’t, or maybe he’s just bored. Either way, his constant narration over the past year has significantly hurt his reputation in the eye of the public.

I’ve written more than enough words on this topic, so hopefully this helped provide some background on all of the noise Twitter has been generating recently. Feel free to let me know your thoughts on all of this on Twitter (as long as it doesn’t break). It’s honestly a comical situation when you zoom out and look at the whole story, so discussion around it is certainly welcome.

Till next time,

Braxton

Song of the Week

As a thank you for checking out this week's edition of Structure here's a song I've been listening to lately:

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