Twitter Scorecard (2.24.24)

Mark X's the Spot.

NEWSFLASH:

Twitter is dead.

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The case, my dear Watsons, is closed. It was Elon, in the DNS library, with the branding initiative.

I can now declare victory and ride off into the sunset, whistling a jolly tune.

Okay, yes. It’s more complicated than that. But before I drill into the specifics, a little background is in order.

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In October of 2022, I posted a pair of articles about Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase:

• In Schrödinger's Musk, I examined the man’s potential character and motivations from a variety of perspectives. Near the end, I proposed an alternate possibility in the form of Elon Musket: a deep cover agent for Team Human, attempting to slay the Twitter dragon from within.

• After detailing my theory of Twitter-as-weapons-platform in Murder by Acquisition, I expanded on this thought experiment by predicting a number of sabotaging domino effects that Musket could trigger with minimal (and fully legal) effort.

I followed these up in mid-December with my first Twitter Scorecard, where I tried to evaluate how well my predictions were turning out. While some of you were more forgiving in the comments, I gave myself a C+ at the time.

There was indeed a fumigation of Twitter’s malignant, Orwellian Trust & Safety, as well as a general downsizing of excess and/or obsolete personnel. Elon put the sword to three-quarters of the company more generally, which was quickly exposed as the dead weight that geeks like me always suspected it was. A bunch of coffee-klatching, smoothbrained ticks and sponges, filling seats between multiple yoga classes and lunch breaks. Most of them were probably umbilically connected to HR or the psychos at T&S anyway. Having worked in such environs before, I can only say: Good riddance.

My “general amnesty” prediction also came true on New Year’s Day of 2023, with a vast number of jail cells sprung open on Elon’s command. We also saw some of the machinery for government interference moving into place, with Ro Khanna playing the part of Uncle Sam’s cleverly disguised trojan horse.

Still, there were misses (or, at least, predictions that had yet to prove out). The biggest blindside for me turned out to be the public exhumation of Twitter Files; a bold maneuver that permanently altered the game’s dynamics almost from the start. This didn’t prompt me to abandon my other predictions. I had to push back my timelines on several of them, however, which, according to the rules of the attention economy, could not take place until the autopsy was complete.

It’s now been over over a year since I last checked my math on Musket’s controlled demolition project (or, alternatively, the progress on Darth Musk’s new surveillance Death Star).

Good thing nothing much happened since then, right?

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Okay, so let’s talk about X.

First of all: Nope.

It’s still Twitter.

Sorry, Elon.

It will always be Twitter. No amount of marketing firepower will ever change that. “X” is the 300-lb bearded dude in the wig and dress, who barges into the ladies’ changing room roaring “Call me ma’am!”

Nobody is fooled. It’s like trying to rebrand the sun.

Just stop it.

That said, Twitter is a very different animal than it was pre-Elonization. The reason I haven’t checked in on the blizzard of mutations, eruptions and other wild developments this year was a matter of adjusting my priorities. While some of these have been no doubt earthshaking for Twitter’s product user base, I decided to hold my fire until I could perceive their alignment within the larger spiritual war.

I think that moment has arrived.

First, a brief overview of the platform’s key changes in 2023:

• Paid Check Blues: The “verified user” status symbol — so beloved by Leviathan’s celebrity parrots and their crybully minions — has become just another ho-hum monthly fee/revenue stream. The resultant hew and cry was entertaining, though its direct impacts on Blue Check Seppuku is difficult to assess.

• Community Notes: In perhaps the most hilarious shift, the unholy dagger of the “Fact Check” has been summarily democratized, and turned against the throats of its former cheerleaders. More so than paid status symbols, these “additional context” labels have already collected several noteable scalps among the palace guards, including those odious propaganda outfits NPR and PBS.

• Xvideo / X Spaces: Live chats, video broadcasts, episodic content, Tucker Carlson, yadda, yadda.

• X Pro: Various Bells and whistles. Essentially an upgraded TweetDeck.

• The Substack Cold War: You all know the drill here.

• Use-Throttling: Starting at the beginning of last July, Musk imposed “temporary” limits on user engagement with the platform.

About that last item:

In a tweet, Musk detailed the revised usage quotas. Verified account holders can peruse a maximum of 6,000 posts daily, while unverified users must contend with a drastically reduced limit of 600 posts.

Newly registered, unverified users face even tighter restrictions with an allowance of a mere 300 posts per day, according to the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive. (He has since increased the limit to 10,000, 1,000 and 500, respectively.)

Here is Twitter’s official limit policy as it apparently stands now.

• Direct Messages (daily): The limit is 500 messages sent per day.

• posts: 2,400 per day. The daily update limit is further broken down into smaller limits for semi-hourly intervals. Reposts are counted as posts.

• Changes to account email: 4 per hour.

• Following (daily): The technical follow limit is 400 per day. Please note that this is a technical account limit only, and there are additional rules prohibiting aggressive following behavior. 

• Following (account-based): Once an account is following 5,000 other accounts, additional follow attempts are limited by account-specific ratios. 

Combined with the new subscription model and verification fees, I think these use limits point to the start of what I consider my most important prediction. It also neatly aligns with the next stage of our spiritual war, of which Twitter will perhaps be remembered as the most high-profile casualty.

I call this stage The Botpocalypse.

And I, for one, am licking my robot-killing chops.

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The Purge Begins?

1. Erica: the feminine form of Eric, is a name derived from Old Norse, meaning “eternal ruler” or “ever powerful”.

2. marsh: a wet, muddy area of land. (Synonyms: swamp, moss [Scottish, Northern England, dialect], bog, slough)

Well hello there, Eternal Swamp Ruler!

If Erica Marsh sounds like the kinda gal you’d like to meet, you’re shit outta luck. Erica Marsh does not exist. She’s a digital gremlin from head-to-toe (if they even bothered to render her feet, that is. Sounds like a waste of precious cycles to me).

Anyway, I had a good chuckle when I read this Tweet, which was both too stupid to be stoopid and too trollish to be a troll. And then there was the mugshot itself, the uncanny twin pits of her blind, lifeless eyes. Like a doll’s eyes…

Nice try, idiots.

That didn’t stop some of our friends and associates from getting taken in by this Electronic Ghost Ho. I don’t mean to dunk on them too hard; the fog of war is as thick as frozen porridge these days, especially on the battlefield of AI funhouse mirrors. And given the larger theatre of Clownworld that surrounds it, it was perfectly reasonable to think that a so-called “former Biden administration member” would Tweet something so self-destructively insane.

But leaving aside the politics, Erica’s programming snafu created both the strategic opportunity and the boardroom cover for Musk(et?) to kick off the Great Bot Purge.

How’s that going so far? It depends on who you ask.

(Sarah Perez via TechCrunch)

It looks like X, the company formerly known as Twitter, has a Verified bot problem. Although X owner Elon Musk suggested that forcing users to pay for verification would help to weed out the bots (aka automated accounts) on the platform, that does not appear to be the case. A video gaining views on rival platform Instagram Threads shows X search results where numerous bots, including many verified with a blue check, are posting a variation of the phrase “I’m sorry, I cannot provide a response as it goes against OpenAI’s use case policy.”

The response is what OpenAI’s chatbot says when a user asks a question or requests that it perform a task in violation of OpenAI’s terms of service. In this case, it’s also an indication that the X account in question is using AI to create its posts.

Due to the age of some of the verified chatbot accounts, theories abound that Twitter itself could be running them, using abandoned accounts as stalking horses. It’s possible, but unlikely in my opinion. Hackers, squatters and even discreet farm sales can produce the same result, and without running the extreme risk of massive reputational and legal damages if exposed. And even if it remained on the down-low, so-called “free” bots still do require many costs to operate and maintain.

As I mentioned in my manifesto:

7. Resource drain
   Like time-drains, this threat category is less a specified function than it is an inevitable result of population growth. As more and more bots occupy a platform, the costs of maintaining its infrastructure goes up. For companies that run on an advertising model, this is less of a problem (and in fact is usually a boon, which is why “bot crackdowns” are so limited and infrequent in certain social media environs). For platforms that are driven by paid subscriptions, however, a deluge of fake users represents a significant economic threat. Chatbots offer little hope of generating income (i.e. they likely neither pay for memberships nor attract them), which has the net effect of bending the cost curve up and the efficiency curve down. Given a long enough timeframe, bot overpopulation will force a subscriber- driven company to adopt an advertising model in order to survive. This model in turn threatens the free speech of users, as the platform has been captured by external corporate sponsors who will invariably rig the rules in their favor.

In other words: the Blue Check Bots might be Elon’s doing, but only if he’s really, really stupid.

Or — as I initially speculated, way back in the day — if he is heroically trying to slay the Twitter dragon from inside its belly.

Ahem.

Whenever Musk does something like this, even very smart people tend to scratch their heads and wonder:

“Is he crazy? Or crazy like a fox? Or crazy like a crazy fox? Or a satanically-possessed fox, hellbent on world domination?”

My answer is always the same:

He is Schrödinger's fox. A fox in a black box. Don’t bother.

But the advertiser war does appear to be at least somewhat real. Walmart, Apple, Disney and IBM have stopped advertising on X. On the other hand, so has the flailing Paramount Global. How much of what we’re seeing is a form of virtue-signaling camouflage for budget cuts that would have happened regardless? It’s been a rough couple of years, including for The Rainbow Rat.

Potential Kabuki theatre and boardroom intrigues aside, the question is whether a true Botpocalypse would help or hinder Twitter’s bottom line. If we take the long view, I think it would be the former. In a subscriber model, bots are red, not black. But at the moment, Twitter is hovering in the liminal space between ads and subs. And now that it’s gone private, it's not entirely clear what’s happening behind the curtain (if it ever was).

And then there is the fox himself to consider. He says he has plans.

(Jacob Kastrenakes and Alex Heath, via The Verge)

Elon Musk wants X to be the center of your financial world, handling anything in your life that deals with money. He expects those features to launch by the end of 2024, he told X employees during an all-hands call on Thursday, saying that people will be surprised with “just how powerful it is.”

“When I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life,” Musk said, according to audio of the meeting obtained by The Verge. “If it involves money. It’ll be on our platform. Money or securities or whatever. So, it’s not just like send $20 to my friend. I’m talking about, like, you won’t need a bank account.”

The “all-hands call” took place last October, before Elon started telling advertisers to “Go fuck yoursel(ves).” In addition to turning Twitter into his personal meme bazooka, Elon has been dropping hints like the above about the extent of his ambitions. Getting Twitter into the payment processor game might seem delusional, especially at the present moment. But stranger things have happened, and I think 2024 is already shaping up to be an incredibly strange year.

If you had to sum up his vision of Twitter’s future, it might be as follows:

(from the very same all-hands call)

Musk wants X to be a “single application that encompasses everything. They have this in China to some degree with WeChat but it doesn’t exist outside of China. We can actually create something ultimately that exceeds WeChat.”

In case you missed it, Musk wants to bring the PRC’s (second?) favorite totalitarian toolset to the R.O.W. (under his manifestly noble command, of course). He also plans to compete with Substack in the long form indie publishing market. Which… well, of course he does. Everything App means Everything App.

But everything doesn’t happen magically, or all at once. Some of it never happens at all, and just vanishes in a puff of smoke.

In light of this, here are my latest — and possibly last ever — Twitter predictions.

Of which I have exactly one:

Grok will marry Midjourney in 2024.

And what will be the products of their unholy matrimony?

You will meet them on Twitter.

I mean, on “X.”

Best of luck.

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A Brief Eulogy:

Taking for granted that death is a form of extreme transformation, Twitter (as we knew it) was dead even before the name change. Again, I could be churlish and crown myself Kassandra. But who wants to win on some bullshit technicality? Besides, I’ve already made the argument that Twitter lives on, the same wicked heart beating beneath the shiny new shell.

The dangers of Monster X certainly remain the same. In fact, you could say that some are undergoing a turbo-cancerous growth spurt, under the guise of enhanced “freedom” and “convenience.”

As always, I will leave you with the warning that Our Fren Elon may be nothing of the kind.

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