"Surprises are entertaining" pretty much summarizes the entire shift in television, news, media and online spaces in the last couple of decades as people chase "entertainment".

The problem with surprises and entertainment is that it is not always consistent with stability or predictability.

And here is the deal: Social structures, governments, and even business often require stability. Regardless, markets LOOOOOVE predictability.

Twitter reflects the human tendency for unpredictability, but as a platform, it also needs to be predictable.

Predictable in its infrastructure, and predictable in its content within a certain statistical range that makes advertisers comfortable.

For Twitter to scale, it either has to offset costs with revenues via advertising, or it needs to charge subscriptions, or some successful mixture of the above which is where it was settling prior to Musk's acquisition.

Unfortunately, Musk completely upset the apple cart and is sending advertisers fleeing because they need some measure of predictability in order to dedicate their advertising revenues to a platform that reflects those brands/companies value.

There is another option, that I had hoped Twitter would have taken...

Twitter needed to become a utility.

Because of the reach and the small footprint, I had hoped Twitter would have negotiated with governments worldwide to serve as a platform for public discourse and coms.

Musk has broken the system so that now individual users cannot trust Twitter's predictability, and now advertisers cannot trust Twitter's predictability.

Where is this going to go? Dunno.

I hope there is a future for Twitter, but adults need to come back into the room.

Twitter needs to re-implement a Board of Directors that is responsive to the role of the platform in society. Given that there are no shareholders per se anymore, the board would not be responsible to shareholders.

At this point, the best possible outcome would be if Musk were to take the $44B loss against future revenues and reduce his tax burden, then donate Twitter to an existing non-profit foundation like Wikipedia or Mozilla.

There can still be a business model associated with that.

I'm sure that someone has done the modeling of advertising dollars vs. revenue from subscriptions, so those calculations exist.

But additional revenues from various governments could also be engineered to provide a dedicated, predictable, moderated platform for a public square.

For Musk that could be a win.

For the rest of the world who uses Twitter, it would be a massive success, and Musk could say he had a hand in that.

This article from @pomeranian99 was what got me thinking about this thread. Like most things Clive writes, it is good and thought provoking.

Running Twitter Isn’t Rocket Science. It’s Harder: clivethompson.medium.com/running-twitter-isnt-rocket-science-it-s-harder-57fd19bf6d5e