Four months which, in feeling, seem much more. Controversies, Trump’s return, cryptic messages… Since he took office on October 28, not a day has gone by without Musk-style Twitter being talked about. On the tails side, the billionaire would have managed to get the social network out of the “fast track to bankruptcy” by separating from around 75% of the workforce (some 5,000 people). The platform is still standing and remains stable around 237 million “monetizable” users. On the front side, the blue bird is far from out of the woods. Last weekend, around 200 more people were invited to pack their boxes, according to the New York Times. Among them, Esther Crawford, head of the Twitter Blue division.
This subscription program is a Copernican revolution for mainstream social networks based until now on free principles, with the notable exception of LinkedIn. Available from 7 euros per month in France (8 dollars in the United States), Twitter Blue provides access to new features such as editing tweets. Soon, it could offer reduced exposure to advertising and above all, allow its subscribers to appear at the top of answers, mentions and other search results. “A way of capturing the interest of those whose job is to create content and who wish to publicize what they do”, remarks Julien Pillot, professor at Inseec and specialist in digital economy. In priority, the artists, business leaders, media and journalists, who influence the color of the news feeds to this day. On paper, the strategy is “rational”, continues the expert.
But the Twitter Blue pill seems hard to swallow for these personalities who have so far benefited from a free blue notch (and already from certain advantages in terms of visibility). Other avenues for improvement, such as the monetization of content from creators, are still dormant in the pipeline. Earlier this month, the American media The Information estimated only 190,000 subscribers in the United States and 290,000 worldwide. The counting of a researcher, Travis Brown, is barely more generous, establishing the number of users at 340,000 tweets at the end of February. That is, at most, 0.14% of converted users. A flop. Except, perhaps, with notorious disinformants, like the ufologist Silvano Trotta, who can now easily afford their buttons and the power of nuisance that goes with them.
hardcore style
“Failure is part of Musk’s way of experimenting until he finds the right formula. He knows, moreover, that digital companies often take time to become profitable. Amazon is a notorious example of this” , defends Michaël Valentin, author of the book The Elon Method (Dunod, published on March 2). However, some indicators deteriorate rapidly. According to estimates from Pathmatics/Sensor Tower, advertisers like Coca-Cola, Jeep, Merck and hundreds of other companies have turned off the advertising tap, worried about the platform’s shift towards undesired “freedom of expression” by the troublemaker of tech. However, their portfolios recently contributed more than 90% of the company’s income. With Twitter having exited the stock markets, Musk’s first quarterly review was, fortunately for him, not made public.
His strategy calls out. “There are no more sacred cows in Twitter’s products. Elon is ready to try many things – many will fail, others will succeed”, indicated Esther Crawford, perhaps without imagining that her very first attempt would cost him his job. The 39-year-old manager stood out for her photos of her asleep on a thin carpet on the floor of Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, California, just after Musk took office. “When your team works day and night to meet deadlines,” she wrote in the caption, last November, with undisguised pride.
Crawford was the very embodiment of the “hardcore mode” desired by the boss of Tesla since the acquisition of the platform for 44 billion dollars. The figurehead of his return to a “start-up” type operation, notes Michael Valentin, in the vein of what Elon Musk was able to do with Tesla or SpaceX. The billionaire had himself set the example, spending hours with his engineers, announcing new technical experiments every day, or almost, upon his arrival. Crawford’s departure is all the more surprising given that she had experience in peer-to-peer transactions and payments in general. An interesting profile for a man passionate about cryptos, who introduces NFTs on Twitter, and who dreams of a super app WeChat way.
Megalomania
The end of the free API (for “application programming interface”, now billed at $100 per month) is just as incomprehensible. Appreciated by researchers and hackers, this API was necessary for the creation of many tools and bots facilitating, among other things, screenshots or allowing to condense the threads (long threads of posts) in a single page. In short, everything that allowed to increase the surface of influence of Twitter on the Web. His great strength.
In San Francisco, the signs of the platform’s decay are piling up. Performance monitoring tools and updates sometimes break down, without that disturbing the master of the place. Users are noticing the increasing regularity with which bugs and sluggishness appear. On Wednesday March 1, the thread devoted to “subscriptions” suddenly stopped working, for example. A recent Insider Intelligence report estimates that Twitter will lose 32 million users over the next two years in part because of these technical difficulties. And of course, the ideological orientation given to the platform and the megalomaniac personality of its owner. The website The Verge thus reveals that in mid-February, during the Superbowl, Elon Musk urgently asked engineers to modify the algorithm of the social network in order to put more forward his own publications.
A new Twitter boss is expected, as Musk has promised to step down. But no timetable has been specified. In the same way, the entrepreneur promised to publish the recommendation algorithm of Twitter. Which, on paper, represents real progress in terms of transparency – social networks tend to jealously keep their recipes secret. Once again, observers are skeptical. “It took the ML Ethics, Transparency and Accountability (META) team several months to prepare for the release of the Image Cropping Algorithm, a far less critical part of Twitter. of Twitter can correctly make the recommendation algorithm freely available, namely, with code examples, comments, which are the norm in open source publication”, comments Nicolas Kayser-Bril, reporter within the organization. AlgorithmWatch. And if a document is indeed published, it will require an “authenticity audit”, continues the specialist. Trust in the “prophet” Musk is crumbling.