New Twitter Feature Could Cause Platform’s Demise, Solomon Warns.

I Won’t⁤ Call it “X”: Elon Musk’s Impact on Twitter

I will preface this⁤ piece by saying that I won’t refer ⁣to ⁢Twitter as “X” here, nor do I plan to ever refer to Twitter as X. ‍While I will cover this in much more detail elsewhere, I think that Elon Musk’s time ⁣as the owner of Twitter is ‍going to be limited — either by him or his creditors getting bored of his stewardship of the company.

While there are ⁤a lot ​of factors that could cause Twitter to disappear, ⁢one of⁤ the important ones that not enough people are talking about today, which may have been an intentional move⁤ on Musk’s part, is the fact that the user experience is completely different than it used to be.

With everything that has gone wrong under Musk’s leadership of Twitter, a functional, technical part of ⁢the new user experience is what might lead a groundswell‍ of people off the platform​ and⁣ in search of greener pastures.

Anyone who is⁣ a⁢ long-term ​user of Twitter like me (I joined in 2009) remembers that until recently, what appeared in your feed were tweets from accounts you followed. Now your ⁣feed is divided into two ‌parts: “following” and‍ “for you.”

This ⁢“for‍ you” functionality‍ uses Twitter’s preferences​ and algorithms to suggest tweets that you might like. It would be a wild understatement to say that “for you” is a mixed ⁤bag in real life.

On the one hand,⁣ “for you” does actually do⁤ what Musk said it was intended to do, which is introduce Twitter users and their tweets into ⁤your timeline in ⁢areas that interest you.

But it does a lot more than that. ⁢Because of the use of what have become artificial ⁢blue verification checks, the Twitter algorithm seems to be stacked against us ​as readers. ​I find with each passing week ​the content that appears in my ‍“for you” feed ranges from irrelevant to deeply tasteful. It certainly has little to nothing to ⁢do⁤ with the topics I actually follow.

If this continues as it has over‌ the past couple of months, Twitter may⁢ be close to violating its own terms of service.

As New York lawyer William Cooper said, “If Twitter essentially becomes a propaganda ​machine,‌ by only serving up contact in ‘for you’ section that it wants to ‍serve, rather than what the user has asked for, there could be a⁤ legal argument that this runs counter to what we agreed upon in the terms of ​service.”

Even if this turns out not to be a terms‍ of service violation, it is fundamentally a change in the user experience. We now have to ⁣check to⁣ see whether ‍the⁤ tweets we ⁣are reading are tweets that⁣ we want — i.e., from the accounts we follow⁤ — or tweets that are being served to us by the⁣ company whose⁤ service we are using.

This really isn’t the way Twitter was designed to work.

From Day One, Twitter was about all‌ of⁤ us having the freedom‍ to follow the people we want, digest the content we want, and not have to be inundated with a lot of content that we’re ​not interested in. Now, the “for you” section seems to be ⁣building an entirely different foundation from the ‌one upon which Twitter was ‍built.

Ultimately, this is the biggest of big deals for Twitter. If ​people like me are hesitant to even open the app because we feel that we are going to get⁣ irrelevant and uninteresting information, then what’s the point?

Even if you are ardently pro-Musk, love everything that he’s built, and think his leadership is great for Twitter, if your user experience changes dramatically, ⁣will you want to stick around?

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The post​ Solomon: ⁢How a ‌New ⁣Twitter⁣ Feature Might Lead⁢ to the Platform’s Demise appeared​ first on The Western Journal.