Musk has been telling himself two things since taking ownership of the micro-blogging site. I don't know what I'm doing is the first message that was seen in Wednesday's demand that all employees click a button to be "extremely hardcore".
The second was seen in a chart posted by Musk over the weekend. Some of the most active users pointed out that Musk had used a classic tactic to make a small amount of growth look bigger. If you do that, it looks like it hasn't changed in a long time.
Musk's chart of user growth, left. The same chart on a scale starting at 0, right. Credit: Elon Musk, Twitter screenshot
The correct chart means what it says. The power users were telling themselves that they were not going anywhere.
Despite weeks of discussion about moving to Mastodon, they were still arguing with the new owner of the social networking site. There are now a million Mastodon users. The "best of dying" account has gained over 40,000 followers in a few days. Despite Musk's flailing incompetence and his money-losing mouth, despite widespread fears of outages, despite a mood that has been swinging between "end of high school" and "end of the world" for weeks, the service is still functioning.
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It is time to ask the question: is this feared apocalypse overhyped?
A "hellsite" and a "trash fire" have been used to describe the site. The " This is Fine" meme, which features a cartoon dog in a blazing room, burst into public perception on the service in 2016 For roughly the same time, the "Helmo" meme has been going strong. Even though Musk's company is on fire, it has always been on fire.
If you're looking for a metaphor, think of Centralia, the Pennsylvania mining town where a vast underground coal seam fire, possibly caused by burning trash, has been raging nonstop since 1962, or the "gates of hell," a similar long-running gas fire and tourist attraction in Turkmenistan If Musk tried, he wouldn't be able to douse these conflagrations.
The most alarming suggestion of a collapse has been made. On Monday, users reported that two-factor authentication was down, at least on mobile. They said that if you set up 2FA, you won't be able to log in again. The problem was with the microservice that sent you a login code over text, not the 2FA service. Users said that it was fixed within hours.
Even with half of the employees gone, even with the thin-skinned Musk firing, enough essential workers remained in place to avoid another disaster.
Even though the 2FA feature has been plagued with problems since the beginning of the year, it was likely that Musk was to blame for the 2FA outage. He had threatened to turn off the many services connected to the micro-blogging site without fully understanding what they do. He's obsessed with the idea that Twitter's code is bloated and that he's getting an education in real-time.
bloated code is often there for a reason, because if you take it away it will break.
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It's a piece of glass. It is similar to a Japanese vase with its cracks fixed and displayed in gold. When the service was over capacity in the early 2010s, there was a "fail whale" that would frequently appear. We will get more fail whales before Musk learns not to fire the important employees who constitute the institutional memory of the company.
So what? We will see the whales again. For half an hour, go do something else on the internet. It will be funnier when you return.
"Move fast and break things" was the slogan of another social media leader in the 1980's and 90's. It was a bad year for Facebook. The slogan was changed to "move fast with stable infrastructure". The march to dominance continued unimpeded.
There have been many teachable moments for Zuck. The disaster of Cambridge Analytica, the multiple acts of violence caused by a lack of moderation, and the day in 2021 when Facebook went down because their server had become too centralized were some of the things that happened. The main cause of Meta's 11,000 layoffs was Zuck's turn into the metaverse.
Is it possible that Facebook is going somewhere? Is Zuck's investment hurting it? That is not the case. There are 3 billion monthly active users and 2 billion daily active users. If Zuck tried to kill it, he wouldn't be able to.
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Musk seems to have learned quicker from his disasters than Zuck did. Musk doesn't apologize for his most egregiously wrong statements, but he does remove them. His launch of the service that lets anyone buy a verification badge for $8 a month led to a couple of days of chaos, just as multiple experts inside the company and out predicted, before it was quietly put down. According to Musk, it will be reborn on November 29th.
In the face of an FTC consent decree that could cost him billions, Musk sent an internal email meekly insists that the company will comply with the "letter and spirit" of the decree.
Musk is on a journey when it comes to content moderation. He had a simplistic understanding of free speech that got him in trouble when users began to impersonate him. A new European Union law that will likely force him to hire more people is something he has nothing to say about.
The article points out that Musk is on a learning curve. Many before him were plowing it. Slow moves in the direction of sanity are pre-ordained. He will spend months undoing the fixes of his predecessor, before a full understanding of the problems at hand causes the fixes to be restored.
Musk is making a fundamental error of thinking that he has bought a technology company that just requires better engineering, instead of a media company that needs to be run by someone who knows media. His small circle of yes men will reinforce his idea. He will learn in a lot of hilarious ways.
You know which service it was posted from when you see a little piece of code in each of the 140 characters or so that it takes to read. No one knows why we did that. Thousands of other users immediately set him straight, as did Chris Messina, the man who invented the hashtags. It's useful in identifying the bots and Musk claims to want to get rid of them. Musk didn't reply. The code is still intact.
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According to a common conspiracy theory, Musk bought the social network in order to kill it or diminish its ability to act as a force for good. Maybe he wanted to cause chaos prior to the elections, or maybe he wants to make it easier for authoritarians to use social media.
You would have to explain why Musk hasn't been sowing more chaos when he had the chance. He wanted to introduce the verify-yourself-for-$8 feature in his first week, but decided it was best to wait after the elections. The strategy of telling independents to vote for the GOP was similar to a newspaper's new owner demanding an editorial endorsement. The majority of independent voters favored Democrats.
Musk has a tendency to run his companies in a state of disarray. The most cruel thing he could have done would be to immediately restore Donald Trump's account on social media. Just like Zuck did on Facebook, Musk punted that decision to an independent committee.
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If Trump does return, he will face a user base that is smarter and stronger than before. Even if you didn't follow him, his dominance of the service wasn't killed. Users learned how not to amplify bad messages.
Musk is trying to convince advertisers to stick with the service despite the fact that it relies on advertising for most of its revenue. The verify-yourself feature is currently in limbo because his large accounts don't like it. It's not a lot of sense that the math of a subscription service is not quite right. Musk's recent fire sale of his rapidly devaluingTesla stock is the only alternative to fund the social network out of his own pockets.
The only way to lower the Daily Active User numbers is to put a paywall on the site. His ego led him to believe that he knew more than the people who built the platform, but his ego will prevent him from making any changes that will make him look dumb in the long run.
Musk wants to be known as the guy who made us a multi-planet species, not the guy who killed the social networking site.
The power users need the service just as much as Musk does. It is not an option to flee from the Nazis. It's been reported that Mastodon may look like a nicer version of earlyTwitter.
Users have to choose a server with their own rules in Mastodon. The "good vibes only" problem is said to shut down any mention of systemic racism with a "content warning"
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If Musk makes a lot of wrong moves, will another alternative come along? It's easy for users to switch and keep their follower accounts largely intact because of the Mastodon problem.
It is possible. Invention is the result of necessity. It has not been needed so far. The rage at its owners will likely continue for a long time.
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