Yeah, but I also think there's a kind of tension here, insofar as part of what makes Twitter a creative/productive place is that it manages to maintain a somewhat cohesive internal culture with its own set of social practices thanks (I think) to the relative difficulty it takes to join! I mean, maybe adding a cost of entry will create the necessary friction to ensure that only people who "get it" will join and stick around (this was always the theory for Something Awful), but it's genuinely a difficult tension to navigate and almost no one has been able to strike the balance well past a certain scale.
Totally... I think it's really telling that Elon has pushed for non users going to twitter dot com to see the trending topics page--which as a feature has been absolutely broken for a while, and is usually a bunch of incomprehensible shit like "JUST ANNOUNCED (800k tweets)" and "Memphis" (2178 tweets, none of which seem to have anything to do with each other) but even when it's working as intended maybe lets you know that, sure, people are posting about the NBA Finals... but it very rarely points you to the "main character of twitter" kind of conversations that make using Twitter fun (as a lurker, which is the user base Elon actually needs to grow to increase ad revenues).
Yeah, but I also think there's a kind of tension here, insofar as part of what makes Twitter a creative/productive place is that it manages to maintain a somewhat cohesive internal culture with its own set of social practices thanks (I think) to the relative difficulty it takes to join! I mean, maybe adding a cost of entry will create the necessary friction to ensure that only people who "get it" will join and stick around (this was always the theory for Something Awful), but it's genuinely a difficult tension to navigate and almost no one has been able to strike the balance well past a certain scale.
Totally... I think it's really telling that Elon has pushed for non users going to twitter dot com to see the trending topics page--which as a feature has been absolutely broken for a while, and is usually a bunch of incomprehensible shit like "JUST ANNOUNCED (800k tweets)" and "Memphis" (2178 tweets, none of which seem to have anything to do with each other) but even when it's working as intended maybe lets you know that, sure, people are posting about the NBA Finals... but it very rarely points you to the "main character of twitter" kind of conversations that make using Twitter fun (as a lurker, which is the user base Elon actually needs to grow to increase ad revenues).