One Truth Republic
What does Twitter need to do to thrive?
Twitter is in the spotlight right now. Everyone wants to know what will happen to Elons $44 billion dollar investment?
Will it die? Will it survive? Will it thrive?
Well… it’s hard to say.
What is clear is that Elon is not afraid of trying things and even more importantly he is not afraid of throwing away things that don’t work. This is an essential ingredient in any company that wants to agitate its way out of the market pigeon hole it has found itself in.
There are a lot of variables at play but before we go there - lets first answer this basic question.
What is Twitter?
Twitter is an information alarm system. That is all it has really ever been. Its short form micro message system could only ever been an information alarm system. If something is going on right now then Twitter is the place to check it. If your other favorite network is down then you go to Twitter to see why. If your favorite public persona is in some controversy, you discover it first on twitter then check it for updates.
Twitter is an alarm system. Twitter is the “notification screen on your phone” of social media.
Because of its scale people have tried to turn Twitter into a place to hang out and all social networks with a bare minimum of features can support “hanging out” but unless they are designed for it they just don’t end up being fun or interesting. Public figures may battle it out on the real time stage that Twitter creates but that model is episodic and is ultimately low value content.
Contrast this with Tiktok, Reddit or Youtube. They are quite different from each other but you can sink hours into each of them without running out of interesting content. Those networks are much more about hanging out, staying a while, taking your shoes off and getting comfortable. Even Reddit, which for some subs is just a remote twitter viewer like r/whitepeopletwitter or r/blackpeopletwitter, is a deeper and more interesting pool of content than twitter itself.
You don’t settle in to review the notifications on your phone. You scan, maybe respond and thats it. Same with twitter. It answers the questions - “what happened with X?” “What’s happening now?”
This picture suggests the way information flows in the social spheres
You can see that Twitter has a very specific role to play. Yes there’s a lot of hand waving with this chart. Yes there are exceptions but i’m focusing on the broad patterns of use.
Twitter just serves as an alarm system and feeds that information to other networks. Sometimes something novel happens on Twitter and that content makes it across too. But again … exceptions.
You don’t need to be on Twitter to get the alerts. You can stay in your deep content network like Reddit and still benefit from Twitter. Not the timeliness but the residual content value.
So my prediction is that Twitter will experience a surge in users due to the novelty and controversy of Elon Musk but over time it will go back to its normal levels. Which is not thriving.
If twitter is to thrive, which means grabbing a meaningful share of users time, it must become more meaningfully interesting.
Lets evaluate the current landscape.
Before picking up your pitchfork about the axis and the placements recognize that these are relative scales and have gone through significant dimensional reduction. It’s not going a perfect representation. But for these purposes it’s good enough.
Twitter sits on the higher intelligence / follower driven quadrant. That’s where alarm type systems would live. If twitter is to thrive it must stretch itself to the top right quadrant. A quadrant where the likes of Tiktok, Youtube and Reddit live.
The sweet spot.
Again - lots of variables and hard to capture the perfect picture. But imagine the sweet spot as a place where lots of people can spend lots of time and get lots of value. Not just any people either. The people who create and consume higher quality content and the people more likely to have more disposable income. The “key demo” lives here.
The energy in the room is at this spot.
Twitter isn’t near that spot. It has “content” that isn’t part of its alarm system but that content is very very low quality. You can’t deep dive into topics on Twitter and learn much of anything. Look up topic areas on Twitter. The random groupings of tweets are laughably incoherent. They are just a random collection of things that approximate a theme. In simpler terms - their algorithm is basic and wrong. How many times have you been trying to follow a discussion on a topic and you see the “show more replies” which may have another reply from the person you are following … or not. It’s a mystery. Your “deep dive” ends.
To move here Twitter will need a lot of changes and features. Some, like long form text and video, are said to be coming. But there are other features that are needed.
1 - Add a downvote button.
Tiktok and youtube have gigantic ML models to predict what you will like next and they work .. ok and in their own way they have a downvote buttons. Reddit has the best recommendation engine. Reddit uses the most sophisticated intelligence system to sort the massive stream of content vying for human attention. All told the power of the reddit “recommendation” system eclipses the computational output of all the computers on earth combined. And that’s you and I. The members of the hive that upvote and downvote content based on the intuition on what is interesting and not interesting. Twitter needs this as well. Up or down. It’s simple and its effective. This clear signal is definitely very useful for comments but also for content itself. I’m not suggesting that AI has no role here but not relying on the input from an actual generalized intelligence is stupid.
2 - Custom content channels with mods.
Subtwitters. Not machine aggregated categories that produce outcomes that don’t make sense but actual human driven channels of content. This does two things. Gets people directly invested in their subtwitter and allows for high quality subtwitters to exist. Human curated centers of depth that currently only exist on Reddit.
So when you enter the technology subtwitter you’re seeing human curated content at the very top. Not tweets that are loosely assembled together by a machine with “billions of parameters” and no intuition.
Let’s compare the science topic on twitter and the science sub on reddit.
I’m not sure what hitting molten metal with a shovel has to do with science … but ok. However the comment right below it has nothing to do with science. This is low value “science” content.
Contrast that with reddit.
This was not cherry picked. This is just the content in that sub. And it’s consistent because that subreddit has rules. Rules that are enforced by humans.
Now you may not like how sciency the science subreddit is but for those that do they will find a consistently useful place to consume science information. And if you thought that science needed to be more about molten iron and shovels then YOU could create your megascience topic with it’s own rules. Your first rule could be “must have a shovel”.
These human curated topic areas combined with human voting signals are going to be superior to AI. AI can help personalize the content to you a bit more but the initial human signal should be the main driver.
Reddit has no real concept of a person. Accounts are basically faceless anonymous entities. You can follow users but outside of people pushing their OF accounts, following just doesn’t happen on reddit. As a result a sub like science wont attract actual scientists creating high quality content because there’s little in it for them. But if you could have a content creator scientist posting on a subtwitter focused on their topic then you now have a win/win. Content creators can monetize great topically relevant material. It’s not just a link farm but an actual content repository.
As well curation and moderation of a subtwitter could also be a place where profit sharing takes place. The mods of a popular subtwitter could get a share of the ad revenue delivered on that sub. Or tips from appreciative creators or users.
3 - Remove the gap.
The gap on the left is stupid. Always has been. Always will be.
It is the answer to the poor thread following mechanism I referred to earlier. Following threads sucks and Twitter tries to solve it with the silly lines in “the gap”. Also the overempahsis on the users image demonstrates Twitters focus on the lower value content of “who” and not “what”. The sweet spot requires a balance but Twitter is leaning too far in the wrong direction.
Extra app features
Elon speaks on adding other value like apps in China. WeChat, etc. This is clever. And more likely to work if the app is already in the sweet spot instead of the alarm spot. Flipping people from what they usually use to a new thing is often a conflation of factors. With enough reasons stacking up you can push someone past the “might as well” point. Where it just makes sense to say “stop ordering food with Uber eats and use Twitter”. Because you can be in the food subtwitter, see a dish you like, and order it. Or be in the makeup-addiction subtwitter and see a content creator that used a particular palette that you like… and order it.
The blue checkmark is designed to get people who contribute to Twitter but the vast majority rarely post … if ever. They are the lurkers… and attaching a CC for a blue check won’t be relevant for them. But being able to order food, tip a content creator or subreddit they like, is a different story.
There are so many more things that Twitter could do but every article must come to an end.
Time will tell what Elon will do with Twitter. And given his restive nature I’m optimistic that he’ll find the thermals needed to enable twitter to ascend.
Johanna Koskinen
