Assuming Musk does buy Twitter, here's why I think its future is much, much weirder than the current debate over his / its political leanings & the question of content moderation 1/

www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-under-elon-musk-what-an-open-source-and-free-speech-oriented-platform-co...

First off, it's not clear Musk is actually going through with the Twitter deal. Really.

He's banned from "disparaging" Twitter as part of the acquisition deal yet he's currently encouraging his millions of followers to dogpile his future employees.

2/

www.theverge.com/2022/4/27/23044521/twitter-policy-chief-vijaya-gadde-elon-musk-policy-criticism-hara...

Don't believe me that Musk might not buy Twitter?

1) This deal is killing the stock price of Tesla.

2) Markets don't think he will.

"Twitter’s stock is currently trading 11% below his offer price"

www.reuters.com/breakingviews/elon-musk-probably-wont-buy-twitter-2022-04-27/

3/

Back to the matter of Twitter's future.

Whether or not Musk buys it, the "let's completely re-think this place" cat is out of the bag.

And there's something ~in the air~ in tech, from @Jack and Parag to Web3 and Musk himself, that could push Twitter to change profoundly.

4/

First, everyone, and primarily Twitter's investors, has been reminded it's been historically terrible at gaining new users / rolling out new products.

Second, Musk-as-chaos-agent has injected "what do we do about this" with a YOLO energy that's rare outside young startups

5/

So there's energy here to accelerate things that previously were kinda academic, like Bluesky, or proposals to crack Twitter open again and separate its data from its apps.

This is all much bigger than just "open source the algorithm"

6/

www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-under-elon-musk-what-an-open-source-and-free-speech-oriented-platform-co...

You don't have to look to some pay-to-post Web3 social startup to find examples of what Twitter could become.

I talked to a (open source twitter clone) Mastodon hosting provider yesterday who said he's seen the rate of signups increase 40x since Musk's announcement.

7/

There is tremendous desire among all human beings to connect with one another and to be heard, but also, frankly, to exclude those they don't want to hear from. Ironically, a "free speech" version of Twitter is likely to be composed of far more filter bubbles than it is today

8/

Musk is obviously the kind of person who looks to technical solutions to messy human problems like: running any social medium.

Others have tried this. Sometimes it kind of works? But it's not like anything most of us are familiar with today.

9/

www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-under-elon-musk-what-an-open-source-and-free-speech-oriented-platform-co...

Say Musk does get Twitter. Say he doesn't. Thinking like this will probably become mainstream either way:




10/

Whether by regulation (just wait until president DeSantis is sending executive orders to the desk of Mark Z.) or by public consensus, the idea that, actually, everyone should have their own social media, just like everyone gets the cable network they prefer, is mainstreaming

11/

Last tweet: Hard to think of a more perfect example of why Twitter desperately needs to be broken into a federated system where people can choose their friends and never hear from anyone else, than Musk himself