Ever since billionaire Elon Musk bought social media service Twitter last October, pundits have been predicting its demise. Some left-leaning figures have been cheering its missteps and urging users to switch to alternatives like Mastodon.
But unless Twitter service becomes unreliable or makes significant changes that affect regular folks, most users are unlikely to switch to a copycat platform. Twitter simply has too large a user base for fans of microblogging to go elsewhere.
A social media service would need to provide something new and exciting for users to switch. That’s how Facebook overtook MySpace and TikTok rose to prominence against Instagram and Snapchat.
Under Musk’s ownership, the biggest change I’ve seen is an increase in advertising in my feed. Also, I was concerned when Twitter switched to an algorithmic feed by default for a short time when I only use a reverse chronological feed.
One change I didn’t like was the cancellation of Twitter Moments. I enjoyed curating tweets on newsworthy topics.
Internally at Twitter there have been loads of changes, including a slashing of its workforce. There’s also been a bunch of moves to try to get users to pay for an upgraded service or for identity verification. These moves come amid a big drop in advertising revenue, with many advertisers concerned about Musk’s changes to the service.
But so far the service has seen little change from my perspective. Fingers crossed.
Twitter as a business is another story. It could eventually fail for lack of revenue from advertisers and subscribers.
If Twitter does goes away, I’ll mourn the loss of a service I liked. But I’ll move on, which is what I said years ago when I joined Twitter.
Photo: Twitter Sand Sculpture at Bush Lake, Bloomington, MN, by Rosaura Ochoa. (via Creative Commons)
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