Yen Thinks

I don't understand Twitter in Musk era

I find it hard to imagine Elon Musk's goal of acquiring Twitter and start to see it as a bluff that was forced to fulfill. I saw good things about what's new in Twitter after the takeover, especially in the Mandarin-using circle.

Keeping Twitter financially afloat after a radical layoff and delivering new features have been viewed positively, but I agree with neither. Being a mostly profiting company with only 3 quarters losing financially, staying away from bankruptcy appears trivial, and achieving such only after aggressive cuts in staff is somewhat underwhelming. One might view layoff as a must with current economic outlook, but this point of view does not seem supported by what actually happened.

Laying off a majority of the team either indicates the lack of competence of most team members or that the corporation is struggling so much financially that costs must be cut regardless of the long-term cost. If the team was so bloated, it would take time to identify the key person that keeps the place running, and it would also take time to identify that considering that existing evaluation cannot be trusted if the company built a bloated workforce based on that rubrics at the first place.

Either Elon Musk did that homework swiftly, or that his team is very confident, layoff happened fast. One could argue that the fact that Twitter still exists corroborates the layoff did keep the essential persons in the team. Or, did it? To date, Twitter is still running, but one could also argue it has been barely running:

  1. Spam management has deteriorated to the extent that a spam tag made to trending topics for almost a whole day in late 2022.
  2. When the lab I am in opened a Twitter account in February 2023, I was surprised to see searching the exact handle does not provide our account in suggestions of the search field, and some following notifications were never shown.
  3. Later the same month, there has been partial outage (page hidden as of April 5th, 2026) for users to tweet or follow other users, and the error message is cryptic.

If a social network does not reliably let users communicate, it might not even qualify fully as running.

Despite basic functions failing, there were indeed new features introduced after the layoff:

  1. Twitter introduced its algorithmically generated timeline as the default tab in the app and the web. It is new UI but the timeline has been in the app for years which was switchable from a button instead of a tab.
  2. Twitter now shows view counts publicly. Indeed, a genius move to take advantage of our attention-seeking heart just like other social media does. I wonder how much marginal benefit is left for Twitter to take with the move by now.
  3. Twitter proposed an increase of word count, which is not implemented yet, and I find it hard to find the competitive edge it brings, but sure -- eliminating the need of a Twitter thread is probably user-friendly.
  4. Twitter introduced profit-sharing program for Twitter Blue users. Ah, yes. Incentivizing interaction. Meta/Facebook is laughing victoriously from 2016.

I don't like both the acquirement itself and what followed, and this starts to look like an extended show that was designed for someone's ego with the subtext saying: "Suck to be you if you are not that someone."