Platforms die all sorts of ways, and one of them looks like Ernest Hemingway’s famous description of how one of his characters went bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly.
Twitter is gradually dying, and has been now for months. Over the weekend, though, some of the initial cracks started to deepen and spread. The platform is now fundamentally and perhaps permanently unwell.
What breakages am I referring to? Take your pick.
Posts to Twitter’s Circles product, which is intended to let you share more private thoughts with a small audience of people you have added to an allow list, began showing up in the For You page, where they were recommended to strangers. Imagine Instagram showing your Close Friends story on the Explore page; that’s what happened here.
Accounts for Vladimir Putin and various other Russian government accounts, which had been restricted from search results and other product surfaces since Russia invaded Ukraine, began re-appearing there without any explanation.
The company now fails to track political ads running on the platform, despite earlier promising to disclose candidate spending.
And after a long and proud history of fighting censorship demands from India’s authoritarian government, Twitter now caves on demand — and has begun withholding tweets that offend the Modi administration not just within India, but around the world.
Some of this can be explained by technical failures. Some of it reflects unannounced changes to policy. But taken together, recent events paint a portrait of a company that has totally lost the plot across several key dimensions, starting with the product itself but extending into policy and government relations.
And amid that litany of misfortunes, CEO Elon Musk’s primary concern in recent days has been — somehow — the competitive threat posed to his platform by Substack.
What a weekend it has been for this humble blogging platform. (See my ethics disclosure about Substack.)
Twitter blocked tweet embeds on Substack; it began marking links to any Substack domain as “potentially spammy or unsafe”; it blocked searches for the word Substack; and then, following heavy criticism, on Sunday Twitter once again allowed people to click on Substack links.
All of this was done in Musk’s by-now familiar pattern of rolling out some terrible change, getting yelled at even by his staunchest defenders, and quickly returning to the previous state of affairs. Also per usual, he attempted to defend his actions in a non-sensical tweet, declaring that Substack was “trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone.” (I enjoyed reading the Hacker News community tear that one apart; for now suffice to say “what?” and “how?” and also “no.”)
Musk is right on that Substack plans to launch a feature that is competitive with Twitter, at least in some ways. It’s called Notes, and I’ve been using it over the past few days while it’s in testing. When I joined the beta, I agreed not to share my impressions until it launched.
But Substack itself has already described the product well enough. Jay Peters described it well at The Verge:
Notes appear in their own dedicated tab, and the feed looks pretty similar to what you might see on Twitter or other social media platforms. On individual posts, for example, you can see familiar icons for likes, replies, and reshares (which Substack will be calling “restacks”). We asked if there is a character limit for Notes, but Substack spokesperson Helen Tobin declined to share details about that.
The Notes tab also has two feeds separating “Home” and “Subscribed.” The Home feed will show content from sources across your “extended Substack network,” according to Tobin, while Subscribed will show content from “a smaller universe of sources tied to your subscriptions.”
That certainly does seem to compete with Twitter, at least for the group of writers publishing on Substack — a small subset of Twitter’s current user base. Musk’s chaotic overreaction to the mere development of Notes served to elevate an unreleased feature, overnight, onto an even footing with one of the most important social feeds in the world. And it will surely mean that more people play close attention to the product when Substack does launch Notes to the public.
Twitter became the default destination for so much of the press corps because it could tell you, up to the second, about the most interesting things happening in the world. A key enabler of that function is to allow people to share links from anywhere. And while its long-term financial prospects remain somewhat murky, Substack has undoubtedly succeeded in building a compelling roster of publications whose work often shapes the daily news cycle.
The problem with Musk blocking Substack links, however briefly, is that it reveals once again how determined he is to pick winners and losers on Twitter itself. For the same reasons that he forced his hand-picked journalists to post his Twitter Files project on Twitter itself, he has regularly sought to stop users from linking to websites that he finds competitive.
In the past he has put temporarily blocks on Mastodon and Instagram; with Meta now openly working on a decentralized Twitter alternative, no one would be surprised if Musk throttles Facebook and Instagram once again.
This a problem for more than the hurt feelings of the Substackers, Instagrammers, and users of the other websites Musk forbids today and in the future. It’s a problem for Musk’s own advertising-based business model, which promises customers that Twitter will attract a large and growing audience each day to find the news and the discussions about that news. Every time Musk blocks a domain, he breaks that promise, driving away users and the ad revenue that would follow them.
Musk’s proposed solution to this problem has been to replace ad revenue over time with subscriptions. But the prospect of an ersatz verification badge has been a flop. And Twitter itself is now so buggy and broken that I suspect Musk would raise more money for the company by starting a GoFundMe for it than he’s going to by selling Twitter Blue.
Often over the past few months, people have asked me what’s “really” going on at Twitter. What’s the plan behind all this chaos? The method to Musk’s madness?
And each time I have to explain that it’s actually just what it looks like: a man bought Twitter for $44 billion, had no idea what he was doing, and is now just changing things at random to see what will happen.
A lot more will break between now and the end. Twitter’s spluttering in the meantime will inspire more competitors to come for what it once had. Musk will have many new things he could potentially block his user base from searching or clicking on.
And the only real question is if he will ever learn the lessons he has refused to learn so far.
Elsewhere in Twitter: Twitter replaced the “state-affiliated media” label it had needlessly attached to NPR’s account with one reading “government-funded media,” bringing us closer to what I have predicted is the final state here: Musk giving every reporter on the platform a clown badge.
Talk about this edition with us in Discord: This link will get you in for the next week.
Governing
Congress is now turning its eye toward AI after years of unsuccessful attempts to regulate social media platforms, as AI boosters and critics launch offensives in an effort to influence regulatory outcomes. (Cat Zakrzewski / The Washington Post)
Meta’s new verification program mandates that subscribers use their legal name, causing issues for sex workers and trans creators. (Morgan Sung / TechCrunch)
U.S. federal agencies, including the SEC and CFTC, are sparring over crypto regulation and can’t seem to agree on whether crypto assets are securities or commodities. (Joel Khalili / Wired)
China’s chip war retaliation is calculated to minimize harm to its tech sector, but further retaliation may be more limited due to the country’s reliance on AI chips from Nvidia and other US manufacturers. (Eleanor Olcott and Richard Waters / Financial Times)
Top secret US documents related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine were leaked on a Discord channel focused on Minecraft, prompting a DOJ and Pentagon investigation. (Aric Toler / Bellingcat)
Apple is forging ahead with efforts to stymie labor organizing at its retail stores, hoping to forestall unionization efforts like those at Amazon and Starbucks. So far, Apple has succeeded — only two of its retail stores have successfully organized. (Mark Gurman / Bloomberg)
Industry
AI research firm Anthropic plans to raise as much as $5 billion over the next two years to better compete with rival OpenAI, according to a leaked pitch deck for the company’s planned Series C fundraise. (Kyle Wiggers, Devin Coldewey, and Manish Singh / TechCrunch)
Guardrails designed to prevent AI chatbots from delving into dangerous conversation topics can often be bypassed through so-called jailbreak prompts. Asking ChatGPT to role-play as a villain can help coax the bot into telling you how to build weapons, for instance. (Rachel Metz / Bloomberg)
The potential risks of AI are at risk of being drowned out by the all-out race between Microsoft and Google to gain dominant positions in the consumer market for AI technology. (Nico Grant and Karen Weise, The New York Times)
The tendency of AI chatbots to “hallucinate” by providing incorrect or even defamatory information is proving to be an especially thorny problem with no easy solutions. (Benj Edwards / Ars Technica)
Machine learning researcher Nathan Lambert published an account of what it’s like to work in the current AI industry following the release of ChatGPT. Lots of burnout and nerves around what is being built. (Nathan Lambert / Democratizing Automation)
Substack’s recent crowdfunding round raised more than $7.5 million, but the company chose not to disclose recent financials and has no plans to do so. (Dan Primack / Axios)
Amid cost-cutting moves elsewhere in the company, Meta compensation packages for Reality Labs employees working on virtual reality and other metaverse projects can reach as high as $1 million per year. (Naomi Nix / The Washington Post)
Tencent and Douyin, ByteDance’s version of TikTok available only in China, signed a cooperation agreement to end longstanding copyright disputes. (Iris Deng / South China Morning Post)
Mastodon lacks plain text search, and its Twitter-like system for in-post hashtags is a poor replacement that makes discoverability more difficult. (Adi Robertson / The Verge)
Google product chief Victor Wong detailed the company’s plan to replace third-party cookies next year with a new “Privacy Sandbox” technology, which may upend the digital advertising industry. (Thomas Germain / Gizmodo)
YouTube added a dedicated “Podcasts” tab to its website and mobile app ahead of a broader podcasts rollout for its dedicated YouTube Music app. (Abner Li / 9to5Google)
Those good tweets
For more good tweets every day, follow Casey’s Instagram stories.
(Link)
(Link
(Link)
Talk to us
Send us tips, comments, questions, and your guess for the next thing on Twitter to break: casey@platformer.news and zoe@platformer.news.
Bring on Notes, can't come soon enough!
We all knew he would screw it up but I think we never guessed it would look like this. It doesn't even bother me anymore... this is pure entertainment.