X marks the rot: What went wrong with Twitter?

I’ve never smoked a cigarette, but after a weekend I experienced a little while ago, I have a renewed admiration for people who once had the habit, and have since managed to quit. 

Why? Because my personal self-destructive addiction is Twitter. I know, deep down, it is bad for me. But still, I can’t get enough of it. For almost 20 years now, I’ve spent more hours than I would ever dare admit scrolling and scrolling…and scrolling…and scrolling. 

But then on that fateful weekend, Twitter suddenly, briefly, effectively disappeared, forcing the platform’s 450 million users around the world to go Cold Turkey. 

The move was deliberate, and was yet another sign of the turmoil that has engulfed one of the world’s most important communication platforms since electric car and rocket entrepreneur Elon Musk bought the company last year for $44bn. 

And the cause was, depending on who you believe, either Twitter guarding against an assault by bots trying to download tweets en masse. Or one alternative theory was that Elon Musk had refused to pay an important server bill, so it was more like an unpaid electricity bill forcing you to turn off the lights. 

In any case, it was a dramatic moment for the company, and it was symptomatic of Musk’s new regime. Because the new proprietor isn’t sitting idly by, leaving his lieutenants to run the operation. Instead he’s getting stuck in to making changes to how Twitter works—and is rolling out major changes at a break-neck pace. 

For example, within days of taking charge, he announced that over half of Twitter’s 8,000 existing employees would be losing their jobs, and that those that remained would have to work harder than ever to develop new features and modify the Twitter app to suit his whims. 

And the changes have led to what is, in my biased view, a significantly worse experience for users. It’s now not uncommon to find features no longer working, or for the site to fall offline for minutes at a time, because Twitter don’t have seasoned staff maintaining them. And Musk’s decision to prioritise showing tweets from “verified” members, who pay the company £8/month, has meant that the all important algorithm is showing users of the site worse content than it used to. 

If you believe Elon Musk, there is some method to the madness. For a long time, he has spoken of his desire to transform Twitter into an “Everything” app. The idea is that Twitter will no longer be just for reading tweets—but it will be a place where you can video call friends, watch full-length videos, or even use financial services. 

And the idea isn’t completely mad, on paper. My theory is that the reason he bought Twitter to do it is because it gives him access to the platform’s existing users and their social connections. And if you want to build an app you can use to send money to friends, having 450 million people already signed up and connected with their friends is a great way to get started. It’s this dream that has led Musk to rebrand Twitter as “X”—the iconic blue bird icon is no more, and our home screens now have a white “X” on a black background to hit instead. 

However, I must admit that I am sceptical of this plan, and not just because it means monkeying around with a platform that I am hopelessly addicted to. 

But the problem is that Musk appears to be approaching the problem of re-engineering Twitter into something new much like building a rocket. With his rocket company, SpaceX, it has been able to revolutionise the space industry by quickly iterating—effectively by launching tonnes of test rockets, making changes, and seeing what blows up. Because once you get to space, nobody cares about the scrap metal on the bottom of the ocean. 

Unfortunately then for Musk, re-engineering the people who use Twitter doesn’t work quite the same way. If the site’s existing users get too annoyed by the changes and the chaos, they can leave. If the platform becomes unreliable, it will no longer be the place to go to get the very latest news. 

So it is a challenge more like trying to re-engineer not an experimental rocket but the engine of a passenger plane full of people, while it is flying through the air. Even if you do manage to successfully land on a runway at the end of the flight, you’re going to have a lot of angry people never wanting to fly with your airline ever again.