On October 27, Musk officially acquired Twitter, which is not the dust settled, but the unveiling of a big drama.
In the more than ten days since, from big layoffs to wrong layoffs, from hating ads to aspiring to building the most respected advertising platform, the spotlight has chased Musk's fickle pace.
Bystanders are expecting or wondering what Musk-owned Twitter will look like?
Musk has said he wants to make Twitter a "digital city square," open-sourcing the platform's algorithms, banishing robot trolls and allowing people to tweet "within the law."
But the reality is that Twitter has just had a tumultuous week, with nearly half a million Twitter users looking elsewhere.
Ideals are omnipotent, reality is chaotic
On November 11, Twitter suspended the feature after the $8-a-month "Blue V Certification" messed up.
Previously, users with Blue V certifications on Twitter were mostly public figures who were authenticated by identity. But since Musk changed it to a paid program for all users, all users can get a certification token by paying $8.
In Musk's view, paid authentication can reduce zombie accounts and is still "the best balancer", but its short career actually shows what chaos can lead to when anyone pays to become a public figure.
A large number of fake accounts impersonating brands, celebrities and politicians appeared on Twitter, fake Musk spread information about fraudulent virtual currency, fake Nintendo's Mario acted vulgarly, and even someone impersonated the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly to claim that insulin was free, causing Eli Lilly's stock price to plummet. Twitter is not selling equality, but selling "authenticity" at a price, and the consequences can be imagined.
The $8 certified service was once seen by Musk as an important channel for Twitter to increase revenue because it was a subscription service other than advertising. On November 9, Musk mentioned in his first all-hands letter on Twitter:
Without massive subscription revenue, there's a good chance Twitter won't survive the coming recession. We want these subscriptions to account for 50% of our total revenue. Of course, we will still rely heavily on advertising.
For now, at least, Twitter still uses advertising as its main source of revenue, but now even advertisers don't trust Twitter.
Omnicom, one of the world's largest advertising agencies whose clients include Apple, PepsiCo and McDonald's, advised customers not to advertise on Twitter for a while because layoffs in Twitter's trust and safety team, the resignation of high-profile executives, and the large number of "verified" fake accounts made "brand safety too risky."
Image courtesy of Getty Images
The paid authentication chaos is just a microcosm of Twitter's acquisition. Since Musk came to power, Twitter's various confusing and even contradictory operations have continued.
On the one hand, it said that a "content review committee with a wide range of different views" would be formed, and no major content decisions would be made until then; While issuing its own ruling, suspending Twitter accounts that imitate Musk himself, stipulating that accounts that impersonate others without clearly marking "imitation" will be permanently suspended.
While hoping to allow people to tweet as they like "within the law," cutting down accessibility teams and disbanding teams that study machine learning ethics, transparency, and accountability can be a disaster for users who are often harassed and users with disabilities.
Chaos to chaos, the road ahead may be bright. In early October, Musk tweeted that the acquisition of Twitter was "an accelerator for creating the universal app 'X'" and that he could target his role model WeChat. Recently, in a live broadcast with advertisers, Musk also plans to introduce the payment function to Twitter, launching a function similar to Yuebao.
However, before being acquired by Musk, Twitter, which was pinned on the vision of "universal application", had long been "twilight".
Reuters reported at the end of October that Twitter's "heavy users" have been decreasing since the epidemic.
"Heavy users" are people who log on to Twitter six to seven days a week and post about three to four tweets a week, who make less than 10% of the total monthly users, but post 90% of their tweets and generate half of Twitter's global revenue.
The so-called "heavy users" can't send a tweet a day on average. Among them, English-speaking heavy users, who are most interested in cryptocurrencies and pornography, have waned interest in news, sports and entertainment, but the latter is the most requested topic for advertisers.
Twitter's "Greater Community" is also in decline, with interest in esports and streaming celebrities declining, and users interested in fashion or celebrities like the Kardashians likely to turn to rival platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
Image courtesy of Getty Images
At the same time, Musk, who joined Twitter, advocated reducing content moderation and making large-scale layoffs, which may further aggravate the deterioration of content quality. This puts Twitter in a self-tussing situation, with one Twitter researcher writing, "There seems to be a significant difference between my imagined company values and our growth model."
Twitter's drastic overhaul has only just begun, but people are already looking elsewhere for what might be the more desirable social media.
Would a more "small and beautiful" social platform be better?
Mastodon (originally meaning mastodon, commonly known as mammoth in China) is the platform that many Twitter users choose to "housewarm".
As of November 7, Mastodon had nearly 1.03 million monthly active users, 1,124 new servers and nearly 490,000 new users since October 27.
On November 7, more than 135,000 users joined Mastodon.
Chosen by fleeing Twitter users, Mastodon must have its uniqueness, and it is often described as a "decentralized Twitter alternative."
On the one hand, Mastodon's user interface and operation are similar to Twitter;
Mastodon, on the other hand, unlike Twitter, which has a high concentration of life and death power, is a semi-decentralized system that is not controlled by an entity alone, but is composed of user-created communities or servers (the platform calls them "instances").
Image courtesy of Getty Images
Mastodon's code is open source, and anyone can create their own community, each running its own server and enforcing its own rules. These communities are connected but not interdependent, and once you choose your own community, you can also send messages to users in other communities.
Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko likens these communities to email, "You may prefer Gmail but still write a letter to your uncle who stays at AOL."
▲ Different "instances".
This also means that Mastodon's community is radical, peaceful, mass, niche, and can set rules to keep up with current events, such as "no mention of Musk", or play word games, such as posts are not allowed to carry the letter "e".
Mastodon's form of community association and autonomy avoids the problems that Twitter and Facebook often have, especially when it comes to censoring and regulating speech. Because the former is to make each community responsible for itself, the latter is facing millions or even hundreds of millions of users, and the level of difficulty to manage is very different.
In addition to community self-regulation, Mastodon users can take advantage of a number of interception, mute, and reporting tools.
▲ Mastodon's public opposition to the extreme social platform Gab (machine flip).
However, because the decentralization of the nature of the founders can not do whatever they want, so Mastodon also has a very extreme community, their existence can not be erased, but the sense of existence can be reduced, the founding team will block servers that violate the "anti-racism and anti-discrimination" principles when diversion, and many administrators will also make similar actions on their own servers.
Cause and effect are mutual, and Mastodon's size and rules give it a "utopian" quality, which also makes it may not grow as much as Twitter. Eugen Rochko argues that Mastodon struggles to replicate the network effects of other social media, where "people go where their friends are, and most of their friends are still on Facebook and Twitter."
It's not just network effects that limit the scale, joining Mastodon is more complicated than Twitter, and its reliability depends entirely on the server you sign up for. Recently, with an influx of users, Mastodon was clearly not ready.
Many Twitter users complained that they didn't receive verification emails and couldn't activate their Mastodon accounts; Some communities have had to migrate data to larger servers, some are urgently recruiting volunteers, and some are no longer accepting new registrations.
The server isn't a recent problem with Mastodon. In 2019, Mastodon's servers were inaccessible about 10% of the time, compared to about 1.25% of the time, even in the early days of Twitter.
▲ Mastodon is on Twitter.
It's an obvious aspect of the contradiction between big and small platforms: Users expect Mastodon to be as stable as the products of big tech companies, but the volunteer-driven network means Mastodon can't handle it well.
On a more fundamental level, Mastodon and Twitter are not a life-and-death relationship, they are inherently different. For example, Mastodon can help you communicate more deeply in like-minded circles, but it can't help you become famous and make you money.
From the beginning, founder Eugen Rochko deliberately set Mastodon apart from Twitter. Before founding Mastodon, he was unhappy with Twitter's advertising policies and its failure to address harassment, so he made a product that circumvented the root of these problems as much as possible.
At present, most Mastodon servers do not have ads, but rely on corporate or personal sponsorship, even if advertising is introduced in the future, because most of the users and content are distributed on their own servers, it is difficult to do audience segmentation and advertising targeting.
In the long run, as the number of servers and members increases, Mastodon's administrators may also inevitably encounter censorship issues.
But at a time when big tech companies are frequently disappointed, Mastodon may represent an ideal direction for social media: there is no centralized authority, and users form like-minded groups to say what they want to say, under the rules that everyone agrees on.
As Eugen Rochko puts it, "We came up with a vision of social media that no billionaire can buy and own, and people's ability to communicate online shouldn't be the whim of a commercial company."
Twitter can't do that, and no matter how lax the content moderation and how arbitrary the rules, Twitter, owned by Musk, is still not owned by users.
Mastodon's distributed social network model may not be new, it is more like a return to the old Internet, like the theme community of Tieba twenty years ago, or even the QQ space more than a decade ago, but it is indeed becoming more and more scarce in the current network environment.
Social media wants to become "bigger and wider"
In the written definition, social media often refers to the virtual communities and online platforms that people use to create, share, and exchange opinions, opinions and experiences, and compared with traditional mass media (newspapers, radio, television, etc.), they allow users to enjoy more choices and editing powers, and assemble themselves into a kind of community.
But from a tech company's perspective, social media refers to platforms that use user growth into advertiser revenue, because advertising has always been one of the most important sources of social media revenue.
Image courtesy of Unsplash
These social media allow us to connect with each other and make everything seem free. It's here to connect with friends, exchange ideas, enjoy posts being liked and commented on, view ads, leave personal data, and businesses pay for this data, which can be used for ad targeting, and provide more relevant goods, services, and experiences.
As platforms grew in size and the number of posts increased, algorithms were introduced and played an increasingly important role. For example, since 2009, Facebook's news updates have been sorted by algorithm by default rather than chronologically. Some argue that this is a driver of extremism, misinformation, hate speech, etc.
The truth is, people are more likely to engage because of anger. Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, said in an interview after his resignation that Facebook has been using algorithms to push posts that make you angry, because studies have found that people are more aggressive in replying, consuming, and clicking ads when angry.
We come and go on these social media and may often get angry, but they are never owned by us. Every major aspect of social media is privately owned and operated, as Vice puts it:
The data we generate, the data centers that hold it, the algorithms that process it, the servers that host it, the teams that label, classify and interact with it, the cables that transmit it... None of them are ours.
So in Vice 's view, simply turning to Mastodon won't solve the problem, the real enemy of social media is all the complex systems that dominate communication networks, with speculators, monopolists, rent-seekers, and asset managers financializing everything they can.
The reality is that Mastodon has always been tepid, and what really makes Twitter, Meta, etc. tremble may be TikTok, because it gets too much attention and useful data.
Image courtesy of Getty Images
However, TikTok is more of an entertainment platform than social media, and its recommendation algorithm is not designed for social interaction between people, but for "passive consumption" - we follow our favorite creators, or passively accept feeds on the "guess what you like" page, caught in a rolling cycle.
On the other hand, mainstream social media now carries too many negative connotations, such as extreme information, pornography, rumors...
▲ Image from: Simple Psychology
As a result, TikTok itself may prefer to define it as a broader entertainment platform. Social media industry analyst Matt Navarra has pointed out that "TikTok may be trying to advertise advertisers that it is a destination for entertainment and a safer alternative to social media."
TikTok has sophisticated recommendation algorithms behind it, but it manifests itself in a simple form, creating an app that is more addictive than previous social media, and is also a centralized platform that also sells attention to advertisers.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock
Under the enduring magic of TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter all have a tendency to TikTok.
In December 2021, Twitter announced testing a new feature that turned its in-app Explore page into a TikTok-like video feed; In August 2020, Instagram launched Reels, a short video feature modeled after TikTok.
In his first conversation with Twitter employees, Musk also said that in the future, Twitter can learn TikTok in addition to WeChat, "We can hone Twitter in the same way as TikTok and make it interesting."
Image from: Reuters
Just like Twitter envisions the future of the universal app "X," TikTok has its own lofty goals. In April, Khartoon Weiss, TikTok's global agent and head of accounts, mentioned in a speech that making TikTok a super app is likely to be a path the company will explore.
As mainstream social media or entertainment platforms become "bigger" and the nature of serving advertisers remains the same, we will inevitably need or miss distributed communities like Tieba and forums and Mastodon, which are far from perfect, but represent another future of social networking.