ALEX KIRSHNER
Twitter’s name is changing to X. The permanence of this change is a matter of some question. Will it last forever? Will it last until Elon Musk changes his mind about it? Will it last until he sells Twitter for parts and the new buyer prefers one of the most recognizable company names in the world to … whatever this is? Nobody knows, but for at least the foreseeable future, the bird is about to be out.
It’s an exceptionally rare thing – in life or in business – that you get a second chance to make another big impression. Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate. Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square.— Linda Yaccarino (@lindayacc) July 23, 2023
It’s probably not a winning idea, something we can only say with confidence because the majority of Musk’s hallmark ideas at Twitter are going quite badly. The paid verification thing has made the blue check mark into a controversial political symbol, to the point that many celebrities (and many left-ish media types) want to be ultraclear that they haven’t bought it. The boosting of paid users’ posts has made Twitter a less enticing place to get into fights online. And none of it even matters much on business terms. Twitter is in financial shambles because Musk’s behavior (crude posts, staffing issues, questionable commitment to content moderation, the broader revulsion he now seems to inspire) has tanked Twitter’s advertising business. All of this for a company that Musk overpaid for ($44 billion, most of that from Musk himself!) and loaded up with crippling debt payments that would have weighed down even a Twitter that still had friends on Madison Avenue.
But the new name will be fine. The new logo will be fine. We are a species of whiners, but people tend to respond to name changes by getting over them and going about their business. There certainly are people who stopped rooting for Washington’s NFL team when it stopped using a slur as its nickname, but they are a marginal group. A bigger group responds to a name change by doing nothing, if its members even realize that the name has changed. I will keep posting on X. I will probably still call it Twitter for a while, except when I am writing in the hallowed pages of newsmagazines like this one, when formality will lead me to use the new name. If my friends and my audience are on X, it won’t matter what it’s called. There is a tough flipside, though, to changing Twitter’s name to a letter of the alphabet: It’s a pretty thin coat of paint that does just about nothing to obscure that The Website Formerly Known As Twitter is getting shittier by the day.
Since the very moment Musk dropped his legal fight against Twitter’s old board of directors and agreed to follow through on his purchase of Twitter in 2022, he’s been previewing this moment. He said at the time that Twitter could accelerate his development of an “everything app” called “X.” This past spring, Musk walked the idea out a little more. Fundamentally, Twitter is a second screen. You watch a football game, and you keep Twitter up so that you can talk with your buddies about the play-calling. You watch Succession, and you can shout out spoilers with everyone else who agreed to experience them in the moment. (Succession was the Twitter of television, in that it was a ton of fun and had a lot of trendy power users despite not reaching as many people as less glossy competitors.)
That’s all fine and good. For people drawn to text feeds rather than videos and pictures, nothing has been more addicting than the feeling of being in the mix on Twitter. That is a valuable property. But even before Musk started carving it up, Twitter was not nearly the user magnet that Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or Facebook was. In talking up the “everything app” idea, Musk mentioned making Twitter into a payments platform, which, yeah: Good payment apps are pretty damn valuable, as anyone can see by reading a stock chart and as Musk knows intimately from his early experience with PayPal.
Twitter—er, excuse me, X—is not well suited to be an app that handles payments, much less one that will “connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine,” as recently hired Twitter/X CEO Linda Yaccarino describes it. Musk’s management of Twitter has been odd enough that it raises reasonable questions about whether someone would even want to give the company their credit card information, much less entrust them with the facilitation of financial transactions between themselves and another party. Musk tells a lot of lies about spam. He’s made the platform harder to parse news on. He’s said some truly gross things, whether he’s realized it or not. He has made the site occasionally unusable. If someone sat down and pondered what kind of leadership it would take to build an app on which unimaginable frontiers of human existence would be lived out, Musk would be a lot of people’s first choice—the man has fans, no question—but (more reasonably, I’d argue) also lots of other people’s last choice.
The problem isn’t that Musk is a bad leader of Twitter, though. It’s that he’s a leader of Twitter, the app that was fundamentally designed to be a supplement to culture rather than a driver of it. Twitter always struggled to print money like Instagram, because more people will get lost for longer periods of time tapping through pictures and videos than scrolling through short text updates. YouTube is an attraction unto itself, a place to go to find something people have been watching for generations: videos. Most normal people are not wired to spend hours on Twitter howling at viral tweets that their best friends, let alone their parents, would never understand. A tiny handful of us send almost all of the tweets. Most people who don’t use Twitter for their jobs seem to spend very little time on it. Twitter itself considers “a heavy tweeter” to be someone who tweets three or four times per week and logs in six or seven days a week. Sending a tweet takes 10 seconds! A single happy-birthday Instagram Story draft requires more brain tonnage than a week’s worth of posting for the small group of individuals who can’t quit Twitter.
To wit, Instagram is enough of a behemoth that Mark Zuckerberg can get bored one day, decide he would like to have the biggest competitor to Twitter, and have it within a few minutes by attaching it to Instagram. If Musk decides that the new X is now a photo app, how many centuries will it take for that app to catch Instagram? If he decides it is now a payment platform, how long until it will threaten Venmo or Cash App or Square? If he decides it’s a TV app, will Netflix or Comcast tremble in fear? Musk seems like a bad manager of a social media platform, but he’s also chosen to manage a social media platform that was never meant to drive at these speeds. Musk might have the same monopolistic bloodlust as Zuckerberg or anyone else, but he bought the wrong toy. A new name is less painful than a trade-in.
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