How Twitter Could Succeed

Much has been made over Elon's recent acquisition of Twitter, paying ~$44B to take the company private. Many of the hot takes are just hot garbage, as you would expect from various marginal "news" organizations; an abbreviated selection with commentary:

  • "Elon disbands the Board" (https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/31/tech/elon-musk-twitter-board/index.html). Note that this is totally normal, since he's taking the company private, no longer needs a Board to represent shareholder interests, and will save $3M/yr in the process. Also note that this was stated in April. Also note that Elon was very critical of the Board; arguably, this was one of the main motivating factors for the acquisition (ie: he thought he could run the company better).
  • "Elon fires 75% of Twitter." This was a bogus story to begin with; current more reasonable take is that he's looking to reduce headcount by ~25%, which seems entirely reasonable. See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/31/elon-musk-twitter-layoffs/
  • "Twitter fires workers to deny vested stock grants." This story, based on NYT rumor mongering, mis-characterizes the concept of "vested" to the point of stupidity.
Yeah... people are dumb, and bad "news" gets amplified for clicks in modern society. However, that point actually segues nicely into my thought on how Elon could make Twitter successful, significantly beyond its current place and role in our society. I don't know if this is the intent, or even on the radar, but I do find the premise intriguing.

There's a frustrating gap in how information is propagated in today's society, which the various internet innovations have been unable to close: timely information on significant events is still gated through traditional media organizations. One need look no further than the ideological spin and alignment of local news organizations, and the aggregation of such under corporate conglomerates, to understand this phenomenon, but it goes much further than that. Media outlets not only control how the information is presented, but what information is presented as well, and they cannot present on everything.

Have you ever been walking around a city area, and observed some police activity? Chances are you might be curious what's going on: maybe its relevant to you at that moment, maybe it's good general information, maybe someone "important" is just in the area, or maybe it's nothing significant. How could you tell? You could perhaps ask the police, but that not only distracts them from their job, but police are notoriously confrontational and abrasive, so that's likely to be unproductive at best*.

* Aside: I did this once, when there were four armed officers roaming around the building in which I worked, as was told gruffly that "nothing was going on". Which was a lie, on its face, obviously, but also came with the strong undertone that if I pressed the issue, I might be arrested or worse for "interfering" with the nothing which was going on. Police are assholes, generally.

Yet, that information exists, in general, in a crowd-sourcing sense. For any significant event, there are likely to be tweets about it, and Twitter is (for better or worse) one of the best sources of actual real-time information for things which are happening. When I see something locally, I go to Twitter, and search local feeds to see if there's anything about it. It's inefficient and uneven, but it's the best option there is, and often you can get good, actionable information from there. If only there was a way to use computer algorithms to make crowd-sourced local news information immediately available to people without having to know the local feeds which might have it, and/or do your own reputation analysis to gauge the veracity of the information (I assume you can see where I'm going with this)...

Twitter has the opportunity to become the de facto source for local, real-time news information, displacing all other vastly inferior efforts in favor of a platform which could provide a tangible and significant boost in value. This has network effects, as well as secondary monetization potential. This is one way that the acquisition and running of Twitter could succeed, in my opinion; it's probably not the only way, but it's one which I don't know if people are considering enough.

Anyway, that's my opinion.

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