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https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1682501248334061572
This is an awesome thing, it encourages people up get off their site
Twitter could implement a feature where you could only read like 25 tweets a week and Twitter would still somehow survive
Ah yes, it’s “to fight spam” and not at all an attempt to cut costs of the free users.
Just keep squeezing Elon. Blood will come out of that stone soon enough I just know it!!
Kinda pointless when most of the spam I encounter in general is from verified accounts. Love that doucheblock extension, and Blue Blocker for automuting accounts that promote tweets.
I remember the conspiracy theory that was going on in the right wing circles of the internet a few years ago, where people like Tim Pool were saying that the blue checkmark was an attempt from Twitter to create a “privileged class on Twitter”…
All of those people are the ones that Elon’s been pandering so hard to and look at Twitter now.
Why is it with these people, that them who cry wolf so often, also turns out to be the wolves so often?
It seems crazy that Twitter is actively taking steps to become a worse social media company. Back when I was a kid, companies were supposed to be these well thought out, highly methodical entities that would only make the most optimal moves. I suppose it’s 2023 now though.
Look up enshittitication, it’s an interesting rabbit hole.
Basically, the idea is that there is a path companies go along where they first please users to build a user base, once you are bound to a platform and don’t want to leave (because “everyone” is there) they instead start to shift towards pleasing advertisers until they also feel trapped (because “everyone” advertises there). The final move is trying to squeeze as much as possible out of all these trapped people and companies. It’s not just social media, although this of course makes it most obvious at least for a trapped user base. But this also applies for any other big thing that “evryone” uses.
“Enshittification” isn’t a rabbit hole, it’s a term made up by a pretty hacky young adult sci-fi author like a few months ago for behavior that has been happening and documented in capitalism for at least a century.
Putting a name on a century-old concept isn’t the worst idea because now we can easily refer to it when it happens once again. And yes, the old age of that problem is why I consider it a bit of a rabit-hole. It’s not just something Twitter does now or that tech companies do now because they copy from each other. It’s a quite old concept you’ll hear about again and again and can read up on quite a bit, if you really are interested into more than the basic concept or why companies keep trying even though the outcome does not always see positive (from an outside, users perspective).
That sci-fi author is 52 “young” already, has spent like 25 years writing and active about the evolution of the Internet and how it impacts personal rights, so I’d give him the right to coin a new term for an old concept.
It doesn’t prevent anyone from calling it:
- “Attract, Fidelize, Monetize”
- “Entice, Entrap, Exploit”
- “Capture, Enslave, Squeeze”
…or whatever other set of words doesn’t elicit a negative connotation in the business world at the particular moment in time.
This looks more like trining to make it run in a stolen raspberry pi in Elon’s basement than trining to extract value.
Let’s be real, there is no value left to extract.
I didn’t want to say that Twitters execution of it is perfect, it’s just why Elon comes up with all these seemingly insane ideas. He has a huge userbase that won’t leave, he had advertisers who he thought wouldn’t want to leave and now he’s trying to squeeze. The problem is that he obviously didn’t have his grasp as tightly around the advertisers as he thought, which is why step 3 of Enshittitication entirely fails, at least from what is known to us. The idea is to keep everyone kind of hostage while you squeeze and while it seems to work with a huge chunk of the userbase, a bigger portion of the advertisers simply move on.
