Elon Musk has made several glaring mistakes since taking over Twitter, and these mistakes are fairly simple, but they loom large in terms of impact, and they’re really turning away users from the platform. Let’s start off with the branding. Elon threw away all of Twitter’s branding over 15 years of branding Twitter, the tweet concept, and the bird logo.
And it was all trashed in favor of X. And so I think with X, You really have Elon forcing the, you force using the X. com domain name. And so supposedly X is going to usher in messaging and payments and banking, but of course that’s working under the assumption that people even want that to begin with. X.
com is a great domain name, but he could have had all of those things available through X. com and had X work in tandem with Twitter and integrate seamlessly with Twitter. But instead he just threw everything away and and forced used X. And then we have the 8 a month checkmark. Twitter had spent years authenticating accounts so that you knew what notable accounts were real and authentic.
And then Elon allowed anybody to buy a blue checkmark for 8 a month. So I get the need to have a subscription revenue coming in, but what doesn’t make sense is he undid what the blue checkmarks were even for. And so then they took away the blue checkmarks from notable accounts, but then they restored them because of the problem it created.
So there was a lot of confusion around this. Now one positive is I like his anti censorship stance. That’s been great. Going back to the bad side, now if you don’t log into Twitter, you’re very limited in what you can view. So Twitter profiles only show the most popular tweets now. Not the most recent. So if you go directly to someone’s profile, you can’t see their most recent tweets.
Also, Twitter comments can’t be read unless you log in only the original tweet. And the reality, the, the, the ultimate effect here is. Twitter has become difficult to use. So now there are less views. There’s less interaction. And of course, the play here is to force you to create an account and log in, but not everybody wants to do this.
And I really think this is stifling the momentum that Twitter had. With gaining viewership. It was a hub of news and discussion and now it’s, it’s really cutting that off. And so this closed system may have worked for Mark Zuckerberg. I don’t know if it’s worked or not, but Instagram still remains extremely popular and people are still using Facebook.
But Twitter is different. So the same rules may not apply to Twitter and tweets can be screenshotted. They can be embedded. The effect can be passed on to other people. So the forced login really not may not apply here. Now, Elon is the richest man in the world. He bought Twitter. He can do with it what he wants.
It’s his new toy to play with, but there’s a lot of waste here. And I think he’s really halted Twitter’s momentum. Twitter was, it had so much attention. It had so many views and people were spending time on it. All of those things are huge and he’s halted a lot of that and slowed it down. So, and one of the things to remember is despite all of Elon’s success, he has had many notable failures and his hyper aggressive style.
Does lead to major errors. And in this case, there’s an asymmetry working against Elon. Twitter was already the number one micro communication platform in the world. And it was already the number one news platform. And I’m not saying it’s not now. But he stopped that momentum and there are asymmetric rewards against him because he was at the top and there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of ways that he can lose ground and a lot of ways that a competitor can come in and now start to gain market share.
over those views if they have a more open system and they’re not throwing away their branding and trying to force another application in on users. So he’s really hurt the user experience and I see a lot of mistakes here.