Winter Rant

I suppose the writing was on the wall. But I never imagined that it would be this blatant and transparent. I figured he would wait till FIFA getting over. What was I thinking?

But this is a net positive move for Twitter, if its infrastructure survives the next month. And that’s not necessarily a big IF.

But I belabor the news here: Trump is back on Twitter.

I wish this was photoshopped. Regardless, this move by Musk is smart (and necessary) for a platform that is clearly losing its steam in terms of actors that can trigger serious, jaw dropping engagement on the site.

And Elon knows what he is doing: he knows that FIFA and Trump are his one clear way to generate engagement and that they will stress Twitter’s infra:

But this entire ploy works, if and only if those servers do not melt. Here’s the thing: if Twitter survives the next month, it will limp on and maybe even thrive on the back of America’s perpetual election cycle.

And Musk seems to know what to do in order for that to happen: lean out the product.
Remember when his inclination to cut away those microservices?
See, Twitter like any product has become a web of features. Managing that entire feature-web and its infra is a challenge. But if you cut it down to bare essentials — all to generate enough traffic and engagement — then that might be enough to manage and make a buck.
And being infested by software bugs and Nazis will not be a dealbreaker for the white South African.

For instance, it won’t matter that not all replies are showing on a tweet. Even the retweet and like counts can be off by a few hundred thousand — he is going after the tweets that have a million likes. As long as tweets go out, and people are able to like and retweet, it is good enough.

I contend that in Elon’s mind, just converting everyone’s feed to FIFA, Trump and politics is good enough to drive engagement — why do you need AI when you know what people crave?

But it is not going to be without risks, and I will close with Nilay’s prophecy here: “Trump is many things but he’s definitely not the sort of dude who works for free.”

This is the first sign of sanity that the white South African has shown. Who knows.

– vijay, enjoying a quiet evening, waiting for a storm