 Prediction for Twitter's demise: 1. Twitter gets harder to maintain 2. Outages increase from once a week to near daily 3. Elon Musk pronounces that Twitter's old code is a mess that can't be saved, and he promises Twitter 3.0 -- which will be better in all ways from the old Twitter 4. A year later, Twitter 3.0 is released, and it's not like "real" Twitter -- but it's a pay-to-play platform 5. People finally realize "old" Twitter is not coming back, and go elsewhere -- probably to Mastodon 16 comments
There's three factors at play in Twitter's demise: 1. Unmaintainable code and architecture I bet you that when Twitter 3.0 inevitably gets released, it will come with much fanfare. At last! Elon Musk is fixing all of Twitter's problems! They have signed longterm deals with Disney, News Corp, and Hearst! Omnicom is an excited partner! ...and then people will actually use Twitter 3.0. And why will people hate Twitter 3.0? Why do I know it will be an incredibly awful experience? As it is, Twitter has been moving to a pay-to-play model for awhile. People have tolerated it because they can still talk to their friends. With Elon Musk, the movement to pay-to-play has hastened. But Elon has already burned bridges with advertisers and content producers, and for him to get them back on board he will have to do something drastic 😁 When Twitter 3.0 gets released, the entire "For You" page will just be ads, chatbots, and "content". You won't be seeing your friends. You will be able to like and share, but your replies will be buried and unseen. Tweeting will be like speaking into a chasm. Kind of like how it is now—but more so. Gradually, people will begin to notice that you can actually talk to your friends on that Mastodon service—so why not go there instead? Eventually, Twitter 3.0 will resemble a dead mall. There will still be a few stragglers: SEO folks, camgirls, crypto hucksters, folks looking for the hit of nostalgia. But after a year, Twitter will be sold to another company. Maybe Comcast. They'll try to clear the riff raff out, but this will also prove unpopular. The last stragglers leave. Finally, Twitter gets sold for $2 million to Automattic or someone like them. It becomes a niche site, only visited for nostalgia. Here's the kicker. I bet that 10 years later, Twitter will announce ActivityPub integration. The pitch will be nostalgia. Remember your old friend Twitter? And all those funny memes? Now you can pretend that it's 2012 again! Meanwhile, your kids will ask you, "What's Twitter? Is that like Blaxogmuffin?" You'll say to your kids, "Exactly like Blaxogmuffin—but mostly with text." Your kids will ask, "Could you schnorg on Twitter?" "No, it was a different time 😢" you'll reply, as you wistfully remember that glorious blue bird—before Twitter 3.0 killed its relevancy for good.  @atomicpoet If I had the $ I would totally reserve blaxogmuffin.com *right now.* @atomicpoet@mastodon.social To miss the point here for a second: Blaxogmuffing and schnorg sounds surprisingly similar to BlurgleFroosh, which is a real clone of a Hubzilla project that someone made.  @atomicpoet and then you'll tell them there was a time when you'd have to wait nearly a minute while your computer did a weird mating ritual dance involving screeching and hissing at another computer before you could do anything on the internet, and nobody else in the house would be able to call their friends at the same time, and they'll look at you in absolute horror @atomicpoet @atomicpoet after reading the whole thread this sounds prophetic. Also I was thinking: "how a Twitter 3.0 when you can't change the API" |
Gregory's Server
Why do I believe Twitter's demise will follow the above playbook?
Because I've seen this happen before.
The most infamous example is Digg.
In that example, Digg's demise meant Reddit's ascendancy.