Elon Musk's First Invention
The new Twitter has given rise to forms of economic inefficiency never before seen on such a scale, mostly thanks to Elon Musk's policies
Elon Musk has succeeded where his predecessors failed. For years, Twitter tried to be something that it wasn’t as a way to satisfy trend chasing investors looking at other social media companies. But Musk has finally wrangled Twitter and has begun to mold it into the Facebook competitor that investors always dreamed of. Long form text posts are now a thing, it’s attracting old people with bitter politics in droves, and there’s even the coveted Pivot To Video™. Ok, well there isn’t exactly a pivot to video, it’s more of a pivot away from displaying headlines, but the result is the same: a bunch of people got laid off and now there are fewer words on screen because the user base is becoming dumber.
I’m not going to pretend Twitter was ever some bastion of higher thought or principled discourse, it was a magnet for obnoxious assholes of all types (myself included). A social media platform that requires slightly more reading and allows you to interrupt and correct others? The whole thing was like a massive classroom filled with Gifted & Talented 6th graders who all forgot to take their adderall that morning. But it was still Twitter, for better or for worse, and you couldn’t get that experience anywhere else.
The new policies that Elon Musk has enacted have managed to change the landscape of Twitter by introducing new incentives for the worst behavior possible. And I don’t mean worst behavior from my perspective, I mean that the Saudi bankers who Musk roped into this deal are probably spending more and more time every passing day staring at the hacksaws in their closets. There are countless ways that Musk has brought out the worst in his platform: allowing users to pay for their posts to be boosted, firing 80% of employees in a period of significant restructuring, adding monetary incentives purely based on impressions. These are issues that other platforms simply don’t have because they are unforced errors.
“X Premium” is probably the most blatant of these issues. In fact, “X Premium” sounds like the example used in a microeconomics textbook, and it works in that way if that textbook was covering the ways that a firm can tank its own value. This is because X Premium implements several blatant economic inefficiencies and forms of rent seeking* as part of its core model, more so than basically any other subscription service I can think of. It’s not even just Twitter itself rent seeking, more often than not, Twitter is taking an indirect hit so that it can let others rent seek.
*”Rent seeking is an economic concept that occurs when an entity seeks to gain wealth without any reciprocal contribution of productivity” - Investopedia
The subscription model has essentially created four different tiers of economic rent seeking. Consider this as a list of new inefficiencies in order of least to most harmful to Twitter’s future prospects as a company that exists.
On the first tier is what I call Naturalized/Passive Social Rent Seekers. These are the people using the boosted reply privileges to ostensibly be a more noticeable Twitter user that might not have a pure monetary goal in mind for Twitter. They leech value marginally by usurping the existing algorithm and adding that value to their own user experience, albeit at greater cost to others. I initially hesitated to call this rent seeking specifically, if only because it’s possible to do unintentionally. Still, it serves the function of creating an inefficiency for other users when it was introduced.
Examples: just go find a tweet with more than 20 replies, you’ll see someone doing this.
The second tier are Active Social Rent Seekers. If you see someone replying with unrelated memes to a news story or abusing trending topics to advertise unrelated content. Value could possibly be gained by some users, but this subversion still goes against the common experience. These accounts are trying to grow their brands by providing something that might be enjoyable, but in reality the amount of people actually getting value is minuscule while everyone else is inconvenienced. AI is probably used, but it could also just be someone who has it down to a muscle memory for rapid replying, either way it’s not very precise but also plausibly human. The shotgun approach leads to many cases of accidental insensitivity. Unlike other forms of insensitivity that Twitter thrives on, this isn’t being enjoyed by someone that wanted to piss others off, it’s basically empty calories.
Examples: sharing a light hearted meme under news of a mass shooting, adding “Waffen SS” to a video of a sheep being saved because Waffen SS was trending
The third tier contains Passive Malicious Rent Seekers. These are the people replying to tweets with comments that are related, but incredibly benign. That’s because these are people abusing the new monetization system to farm for impressions using AI generated replies from chatbots like ChatGPT. Compared to Social Rent Seekers, these are users that have no intention of appealing to or attracting any one with enjoyable content.
AI at least partially running these accounts presents another issue for Twitter. While Social Rent Seekers interacted with other users and saw the advertisements Twitter still makes most of its money from, Malicious Rent Seekers only exist to reply and then move on. A glance at the likes tab of these accounts often reveals that the number of likes is far less than the number of tweets, indicating that the account itself isn’t being used outside those replies.
They are the equivalent of barnacles, latching on to large objects so they can collect any micronutrients that happen to float by. You won’t notice one or two of them, but if enough culminate, they significantly slow down or damage their hosts.
Examples: First image shows what is clearly a ChatGPT generated response based on the headline, which doesn’t draw on any information outside the headline (ChatGPT doesn’t use data from after September 2021).
Second image shows replies to a Popbase tweet about Taylor Swift’s or Beyoncé’s concert films not being eligible for the Oscars. The person asking who either artist is so they can call them a beauty icon might have tipped you off to the nature of these replies.
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