The IT Nerd

Elon Musk’s power play to get employees to sign on to being “hardcore” has crashed and burned. Overnight that had the hashtag “#RIPTwitter” trending, people announcing that they were moving to other social media sites, and I noticed this on Down Detector:

Well Twitter is still alive as I type this. But for how much longer? The way I see it, there are a number of scenarios that could play out here given everything that has happened to this point. Four specific scenarios come to mind along with a bonus one:

1. Users leave Twitter taking advertisers with them: Given the events of last night, it would not at all surprise me if user engagement plummets on Twitter. Now that Twitter is a private company, it is highly likely we will never see the truth on what those numbers look like. But if user engagement drops, we’ll see that as other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Mastodon gain users. And more importantly advertisers will see that and direct their money to the places where people are which will leave Twitter out in the cold. And the lack of advertising revenue will ensure that Twitter dies a slow death.
2. Twitter gets hacked: Seeing as the key people behind Twitter’s platform security have left, this now makes Twitter a prime target for hackers. To be honest, it was highly likely that Twitter was repelling attacks long before the Elon Musk gong show. But without the key people manning the defences, it is only a matter of time before someone pwns Twitter and Twitter dies as a result from the bad press.
3. Twitter simply falls apart: From all reports, there’s a lot of people who worked at Twitter who know something that not only nobody else knows, but can’t be replicated. Having that level of institutional knowledge go out the door will be fatal for Twitter. It is probable that Twitter will limp along for weeks or perhaps months. But small things will start to break. Followed by bigger things. And with nobody who knows how any of that stuff works, it is probable that this will kill Twitter.
4. Musk uses the nuclear option: During Elon Musk’s reign as “Chief Twit”, Musk has been exposed as not being as smart as he portrays himself to be given the high profile failures of leadership that we’ve seen since he took over. And the longer that this goes on, the more his fragile ego will be unable to cope with it. So it would not shock me if he wakes up one morning and declares the whole thing bankrupt killing the platform in one go. Then Musk will try and spin it as not being his fault to save his fragile ego. Even though the world would have seen him kill the platform though his actions over the last two or three weeks.

There’s a bonus scenario for the people asking “where’s the option of Twitter surviving?” Musk and his fragile ego give up and sell Twitter to a group who can actually run the company. And that group tries to rebuild. But even if they did get Twitter stable, it won’t be anywhere near the same as it was before Elon Musk the immature billionaire took over as has already caused so much damage that I don’t think anyone can repair it. And I think that’s the point of all these scenarios. Which is Twitter as we know it is done. It is now a question of if it dies quickly, dies slowly, or stays in some sort of comatose like state never to recover.

This entry was posted on November 18, 2022 at 8:58 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.