Ask HN: What is Elon Musk's strategy in buying Twitter? Lot of Silicon Valley bigwigs, including Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, have heavily invested in cryptocurrency. Will there be some cryptocurrency integration with Twitter? That could give cryptocurrency some sort of legitimacy because lot of politicians and government organisations use Twitter as a means of communication. |
In short: Musk made an offer for the lulz because how many people can joke about $44B, got trapped in it, loves Twitter, hates Twitter, figures there’s something there, wants out, wants to go big, ask again tomorrow.
He’s rich enough that he can afford to be erratic and cavalier, none of his past statements should be taken as predictive of future actions. He’s already gone from “all moderation is censorship” to “of course we don’t want the dystopian bell scape that complete laissez faith would produce”. Tomorrow he might run the firehouse through CCP’s censors. For the lulz.
Seems to me Musk got bored waiting for the EPA to give a go-ahead for Starship and things got wayy out of hand.
Have any journalists had the same insight?
I actually do think he's going to succeed, but he's in a weird place, which I think means he has to change the rules into what it means to remake twitter. Like a debate where the winner is the one who best redefines the nature of the debate.
If he just cuts moderation he will lose users and be further than ever from an idea of a public square. If he creates better tools for self-moderation, I think he also somewhat destroys the core of what Twitter is. It seems that people basically use twitter for two reasons, hot takes and self-promotion. If you enable greater self-moderation then I think you lose the hot takes crowd. If you just remove global moderation and make it a free for all you lose the self-promotion crowd.
If you do what Jack Dorsey does and try to remove all advertising then it becomes a money pit. What makes twitter so complicated and expensive to run is probably all the graph infrastructure and algorithms that allow you to figure out how to connect people. If you remove that you solve a whole lot of problems but again, then Twitter just becomes a chat app. Without things become viral or shared communication a la "What's happening" I don't think Twitter is Twitter.
Which leads to: I really like Tik Tok and Tik Tok makes a shit ton of money, but Tik Tok is fundamentally not twitter. It’s the only social network where I rarely read the comments. It doesn’t _feel_ like twitter. Twitter feels like I’m connected to the whole world which feels chaotic. Tik Tok feels like I’m watching a custom local access network customized to my interests. Something like this, changing the philosophical UX of twitter is how you succeed. But then it’s not really a public square so.
[1]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1585619322239561728
My _crazy off-the-wall_ theory is that his mid-level plan is to "bring back AOL". That is, to turn Twitter into a paywalled garden like AOL was back in the 1990s before AOL users could access the outside Internet.
Charging a Twitter subscription would cause a massive shed of users, but where will they go to? Charging money would also keep out most of the bad actors. You would have to do a balancing act of how to ensure there are remaining Twitter users left to keep the ecosystem healthy. It's crazy to think about, who would pay for Twitter?
I'm not accountant enough to do the math to calculate the time until monetary payback. But if a radical transformation of Twitter is the goal, then Musk is playing a long game where dollars aren't the first priority.
It would also create a reason to buy StarLink in markets where FIOS/etc is already cheaper, sales pitch: "buy StarLink and get a free Twitter subscription"