A little more than a year ago, Elon Musk began his reign at Twitter with an elaborately staged pun. On Wednesday, October 26, 2022, he posted a tweet with a video that showed him carrying a sink through the lobby of the company’s San Francisco headquarters. “Entering Twitter HQ—let that sink in!” he wrote. At the time, I was a coder for Twitter’s language-infrastructure team. (If you’ve ever used Twitter’s translation feature, or are using Twitter in a language other than English, that was us.) I saw Musk’s tweet when it was shared in a company-wide Slack channel. He looked like a giddy warlord entering an enemy stronghold he’d besieged for months.
There were no more updates until the next day, when a Twitter employee shared a tweet from CNBC: “Elon Musk now in charge of Twitter, CEO and CFO have left, sources say.” The ambiguity of the phrase “have left” was soon clarified by a Times article reporting that Twitter’s C.E.O., C.F.O., and general counsel had been fired, along with its head of legal, policy, and trust. Originally, the acquisition had been slated to close on Friday, but Musk pulled a switcheroo by “fast-closing” the deal on Thursday afternoon. This maneuver allowed him to fire the executives “for cause,” which denied them severance and stock options. The vibe in the office was jokey and un-self-pitying. Everyone seemed in for some grim comedy while it lasted.
Musk filled the vacant leadership suite with his lawyer-fixer Alex Spiro and a few others whom the employees collectively called “the goons.” Some key internal managers kissed the ring and enlisted themselves as Musk’s lieutenants; another reportedly puked into a trash can when asked to fire hundreds of people. Half of the workforce was laid off, but those whose roles turned out to be somewhat critical were then begged to return. Some unlucky engineers were dragooned into launching the new Twitter Blue feature, which would charge users $7.99 per month for a “verified” check mark; the rollout was catastrophic. “We are excited to announce insulin is free now,” a newly verified account impersonating the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly tweeted; the pharma’s market valuation went down by billions that day. Twitter Blue was the first in a series of pratfalls that would slash sixty per cent of the company’s advertising revenue and lead to an exodus of users to other platforms.
I wasn’t laid off, but anyone with functioning nerve endings could see that staying would offer no joy. At 12 A.M. on the day before Thanksgiving, Musk sent an e-mail with the subject line “A Fork in the Road.” He wrote, “Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore.” The e-mail included a link to a Google form that needed to be filled out by 5 P.M., East Coast time, the next day. It had one question—“Would you like to stay at Twitter?”—that had one answer: “Yes.” I am not hard-core. I took the exit.
The next day, I went to Twitter’s headquarters one last time. During the first week of the takeover, we employees had felt like extras in an episode of the show “Silicon Valley,” but the comedic aspect of the affair had ended. In the office, every conversation started with each of us asking, “Did you click ‘Yes’?” The prevailing mood, somehow, was quietly celebratory: if you had quit, it felt freeing to be no longer subject to the whims of a mercurial techno boy. (Of course, a sizable number of employees had no option but to stay, to keep their work visas.) Those who had opted in seemed almost apologetic. In a strange reversal, those of us who were quitting felt sorry for those who had chosen to remain.
After leaving the monolithic Art Deco building on Market Street, I biked around San Francisco, listening to a Twitter Space hosted by the journalists Katie Notopoulos and Ryan Broderick. It ran for almost four hours, and was joined by nearly two hundred thousand people. Listening to a cast of early Twitter employees, journalists, and Twitter users of all stripes speak nostalgically about the platform affirmed what I’d long suspected: many Twitter users hate Twitter the way New Yorkers hate New York—they don’t. It was as if people had gathered to mourn a common foe whom they had publicly reproached yet privately appreciated. They were stunned by Twitter’s sudden and unceremonious death, given that they’d been sparring with it just days ago. The speakers eulogized the careers that had been made, the friends who’d been discovered, and the memes that they’d indulged on the platform. “Tweeps are just hanging out in Slack saying nice things to each other until their access is cut off,” the journalist Casey Newton tweeted, on the day of the layoffs. “Twitter employees get endless shit, but the ones I knew—they worked hard, their work mattered, and they never stopped trying. Not until the moment their screens went blank.”
During my time at Twitter, the employees I met were ludic and easeful. Yet, even on quiet days, there was an undercurrent of vigilance. The platform was defined by a paradoxical mix of silliness and seriousness, the latter often undergirding the former. When I got hired, one of the first things I did when I received my laptop was log on to Slack and scroll back to January 6, 2021. I already knew from reporting by the Washington Post and the Verge that the call to permanently ban Donald Trump from Twitter had come from employees: “We helped fuel the deadly events of January 6th,” they wrote, in an internal letter. On Slack, I saw thread after thread of employees questioning executives’ milquetoast responses to the letter, especially after Facebook had banned Trump and YouTube had suspended his account.
I joined the company almost a year after the January 6th reckoning, but the culture of open criticism was well preserved. On Slack, employees weren’t afraid to directly mention the company’s co-founder Jack Dorsey, or its C.E.O., Parag Agrawal; if someone poked fun at @jack or @paraga, the executives often responded with sassy repartee. But, when Musk took over, questioning of him led to swift firings. A number of employees debated Musk’s actions in the company-wide #social-watercooler channel, and, the day after, we woke up to find many of their accounts gone. “So is this like a Candyman situation?” someone posted. “Mention Elon three times and we get deactivated?”
The idea of openness had expressed itself outside of the company, too, in Twitter’s significant yet underappreciated contributions to open-source and academic research. Bootstrap, a tool kit for building visual interfaces that was released freely by Twitter in 2011, is now used by twenty per cent of all Web sites. (Once you see its visual language, you’ll recognize it everywhere.) And countless useful tools had been built by other programmers using Twitter’s A.P.I., or application-programming interface—a way for outsiders to make use of Twitter’s data. Among other things, the A.P.I. allowed people to create automated accounts, from New New York Times, which tweeted “words when they appear in the NYT the 1st time,” to SF QuakeBot, which sends alerts when earthquakes occur in the Bay Area.
One of Musk’s changes was to introduce new pricing plans that made A.P.I.s unaffordable for many users. This seemed typical of the new regime. At pre-Musk Twitter, product decisions were usually made from the bottom up, or with careful A/B testing. But now there seems to be one “product person”—Musk—who is singularly unequipped to imagine what a typical Twitter user might want. On Twitter, users construct different gestalts of the platform through their own feedback and engagement; in this respect, Musk’s usage pattern is many standard deviations away from what’s ordinary. Click on any of his tweets to read the replies, and you’ll find an entropic mix of flattery, belligerent language, memes, and product shilling. Imagine the maelstrom of likes and mentions he gets every millisecond. There’s nothing “standard” about Musk’s Twitter experience. It’s like tasking someone who only flies on private jets with redesigning the commercial-flight experience.
Silicon Valley’s platitudinal phrases, such as “growth hacking” or “first-principles thinking,” make my hair stand on end, but the startup incubator Y Combinator has a pretty good one: “Make something people want.” It’s notable that some of Twitter’s most important features, such as hashtags and tweet threads, were invented by its users. But the changes being made now seem to be ones that Musk wants, or ones that he thinks users want. A good example is the short-lived removal of headlines from articles shared by users: rolled out this past October, the change made it so that a post showed only the art of an article that was shared, requiring users to click on the art to access the link. In August, when Fortune reported on the upcoming change, Musk tweeted, “This is coming from me directly. Will greatly improve the esthetics.” The day before the change went live, he posted, “I almost never read legacy news anymore.” (The platform has since brought back the headlines: at least for now, they’re present, but in a tiny font.)
A year after Musk’s Google form, we know that there will be no “Twitter 2.0.” In fact, Twitter no longer exists as a legal entity; it’s been merged into X Corp. (Hats off to editors everywhere who dutifully add “formerly known as Twitter” to mentions of the platform.) The over-all direction of Musk’s changes hasn’t been too surprising, but the magnitude of the shift—the sheer inanity of it—still shocks me. Wiping out billions in brand value by changing the platform’s name; decimating the developer ecosystem; testing out charging new users for the service. These decisions seem indistinguishable from acts of self-sabotage.
In October, after Hamas’s attack on Israel, a wealth of articles were written about X’s botched response: the platform had become a global disinformation reel, and had struggled to filter out hate speech and fabricated content. In many of the articles, the tone was not just condemnatory but wistful. Clive Thompson invoked the term “solastalgia,” which he described as a “form of sadness caused when one’s environment changes—changes so much that it is no longer recognizable.” I had resisted using the word “sadness” in my own thinking about Twitter because I felt it was too melodramatic for the demise of a social-media app. But that was the emotion I located in myself. Sadness wasn’t all I felt, of course. In June, it was reported that Ella Irwin, the head of the trust-and-safety team, had resigned; this was followed by another round of layoffs for the team in the first week of September. Firing the trust-and-safety team at X is as dangerous as it sounds.
I was still at Twitter in February, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. At work, there was a palpable sense of urgency. Like many others, I watched Volodymyr Zelensky’s video, in which he declared that he would remain in Kyiv, and started following the collection of academics, journalists, and eyewitnesses who would soon comprise “Ukraine Twitter.” As the number of translation requests for Ukrainian tweets surged, our team made changes to insure that the service could keep up, and addressed reports of mistranslation. I had no illusions that our efforts were anything grand. But it was somewhat gratifying to see a shout-out tweet from an engineering manager at Twitter, addressed to our team: “Feeling so proud of the Language Infra team at Twitter today. Their work is supporting the translation of 10+ millions of tweets a day from Ukrainian to dozens of languages around the world 🇺🇦.” It seems like things are different now. “Thank you Elon Musk for this Everything app: Now I can get all my misinformation in one place,” Scott J. Shapiro, a professor of law and philosophy at Yale, tweeted.
When you first join Twitter—or X—the timeline algorithm acts like a parrot hatchling whose job is to fetch the news and recite it to you on demand; over time, the baby parrot observes the articles you’re reading, monitors whom you follow, and learns from what you say. If you engage with noxious content, you end up with a naughty parrot who reads you the tabloids. If you tame your parrot well, it can become a pretty good curator of information—often, quite a funny one. Yet there’s only so much you can do if the parrot is unruly to begin with, or if the news it sees is fabricated. As a Twitter user, I stuck by the dictum to “follow judiciously and mute unforgivingly,” and I rarely saw hateful and divisive content. But it seems to me that, on X, the parrot has gone rogue; it’s stubbornly resistant to my instructions.
On the economist Tyler Cowen’s blog Marginal Revolution, Cowen has argued for “the robustness of Twitter,” writing that he still finds it essential for following recent events, such as the high-speed development of A.I. “You all should be long Twitter,” Cowen suggests. But Twitter was always more than a news source, or a conduit for information. It was a place where a sense of goofiness and comfort allowed communities to form—Weird Twitter, Philosophy Twitter, BTS Twitter. Such communities allowed users to find the platform endearing, even as they called it the “hellsite.” Communities allowed Twitter to survive and even thrive despite being a money-losing business; they made it a place not just for breaking news or smart threads but for casual yet vital interactions—congratulating fellow-writers on their book launches, hearing friends grumble about mediocre Thanksgiving dinners.
Community can be a fuzzy, sentimental notion. But, on Twitter, communities are concrete. The platform’s recommendation algorithm is powered by “SimClusters,” a representation of overlapping communities that, according to the company, “range in size from a few thousand users for individual friend groups, to hundreds of millions of users for news or pop culture,” and are “anchored by a cluster of influential users.” Pre-Musk Twitter leaned into fostering such communities; the month before the acquisition, an all-hands meeting featured a presentation from the company’s head of global K-pop and K-content partnerships, whose responsibilities involved promoting collaborations between Twitter and key players in the K-pop industry. But if a community can be fostered it can also fade. Every time a high-profile user leaves the platform in response to Musk’s antics, a critical node in the social graph is removed. I wonder whether Musk understands that to undermine communities is to weaken the principal element that sustains the service. To monitor the health of a social-media platform, you can ask a question you might also ask of an indie-music venue: Is it still cool to hang out there? Since the takeover, for many people, it doesn’t “feel good” to be on Twitter. Friends are leaving, and tweeting feels like shouting into the void.
What does the future hold? It seems likely that users will still come for breaking news, and for expert threads, and for the memes recycled by dedicated joke accounts. Some weirdness will persist—and yet the weirdos will be gone. The platform will have lost its élan. Twitter’s laughably unserious name belied its seriousness. But X, with its overbearing name, may not prosper unless it undertakes the serious work of maintaining a platform on which people want to be. ♦
