Twitter always used to look a lot like Craigslist. It stumbled into something that a lot of people found very useful, with very strong network effects, and then it squatted on those network effects for a generation, while the tech industry moved on. Twitter, as a technology company, has been irrelevant to everything that’s going on for a decade. It was the place where we talked about what mattered, but Twitter the company didn’t matter at all - indeed it did nothing for so long that people got bored of complaining about it.
Meanwhile, lots of people tried to build a better Craigslist and a better Twitter, but though a better product was pretty easy, the network effects were too strong and none of them really worked. Instead, we unbundled use cases one by one. As Andrew Parker pointed out in 2010, a whole range of people from Airbnb to Zillow to Tinder unbundled separate pieces of Craigslist into billion dollar companies that didn’t look like Craigslist and solved some individual need much better. This is often the real challenge to tech incumbents: once the network effects are locked in, it’s very hard to get people to switch to something that’s roughly the same but 10% better - they switch to something that solves one underlying need in an entirely new way.
Hence, Mastodon has been around since 2016 without getting much traction, but slices of conversation, content or industry have been unbundled to Reddit, LinkedIn, Instagram, Signal, Discord or, more recently, Substack, which someone joked was Twitter’s paywall.
Meanwhile, Twitter itself drifted aimlessly for a decade, becoming known in Silicon Valley as a place where no-one could get anything done. This is a big part of why Elon Musk was able to buy it - $44bn was a top-of-the-market price, but even Snap was worth $75bn in January 2022, when he started building a stake - how much bigger should Twitter have been? And so, when he made his bid, there was, briefly, a lot of enthusiasm in tech: pent-up frustration with the existing product and a sense of how much better it could be; enthusiasm that there could be innovation and new product ideas (and, from a small but noisy group, frustration with the politics of Twitter’s content policies, of which more in a moment).
It didn’t work out like that. The last year swapped stasis for chaos. Stuff breaks at random and you don’t know if it’s a bug or a decision. The advertisers have fled, and no-one knows what will be broken by accident or on purpose tomorrow. The example that’s closest to home for me was that the in-house newsletter product was shut down - and then links to other newsletters were banned. Pick one! It’s hard to see anyone who depends on having a long-term platform investing in anything that Twitter builds, when it might not be there tomorrow.
There are various diagnoses for this.
by Benedict Evans | Read more:
Image: Andrew Parker
[ed. Money will always have strange effects on people. But, not just money. Power. Musk controls one of the largest media platforms on the planet. Trump gets elected President. Nazi's make a comeback in the US (less than 75 years after WWII). AI charges full speed ahead with no apparent brakes. Weaponized capitalism is pervasive. Economic inequality is stratospheric. The world heats and burns. Meanwhile, trivia, celebrity, technological toys/distractions, sports and games rule the day. Overall, a civilizational mental health crisis/breakdown. See also: Elon Musk offers $1B to Wikipedia if it changes its name (The Hill):]"Billionaire Elon Musk offered Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, $1 billion under the condition that it changes its name to “Dickipedia.”
