Tim Pool EP68 - Twitter Is DYING And Jack Dorsey Is Just Making It Worse
Twitter Is DYING And Jack Dorsey Is Just Making It Worse. Was Jack Dorsey on Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, and Gad Saad's channels because he is desperately trying to stop Twitter from dying?In the past several months Twitter has been experience a loss in users. So much so the company changed the way it reports active users so it looks like they are actually growing. It seems that jack enacted far left and leftist policy in order to "create healthy" conversations but what they really means is that he is playing a numbers game. More people on, less people off.But Twitter's biased rules means that he is going to lose people no matter what and he doesn't care how it impacts society and our government. It may not be that Jack himself is far left but that he is catering to the regressive social justice crowd in an effort to maintain user growth. Conservatives will stay on if they can but the regressive left won't, they will leave like Wil Wheaton did with a temper tantrum.
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As many of you probably know, I was recently on the Joe Rogan Experience with Jack Dorsey, and many people were curious as to why Jack would actually come on this platform and confront me, or have a discussion with me, when they clearly would have known I would present them with some impossible questions they couldn't defend.
In many circumstances, they couldn't defend them.
I don't think I did a perfect job, there's a lot of things I wasn't able to bring up, but a lot of people appreciated that at least the conversation happened.
Now I think the reason Jack had the conversation is because Twitter is dying.
According to several different metrics over the past year, and even recently released by Twitter themselves, it seems like they're actually dying.
They're not that relevant.
But they do hold a certain amount of influence in our political landscape, which is why I'm so concerned with the issue.
Jack, it would seem, is trying to maximize the amount of people who use the platform, and that means getting rid of people who hold opinions that might make people upset.
But where does that bring us?
It would seem that the demise of Twitter is absolutely inevitable.
Because banning people makes them and their friends want to leave, and not banning mean people makes other people want to leave, so what's your solution?
Apparently it's nothing.
I think Jack decided to have the conversation with me, Sam Harris, Scant Sad, and others, Because he knows he's losing users on a certain side of the cultural debate.
And it seems like there is no solution to guarantee the continued growth of Twitter, and it's only going to continue to become less relevant today.
Let's take a look at some of the recently released news about Twitter, and I'll go over some issues with Silicon Valley.
And I gotta say, I think the era of the tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley having so much influence in politics Might actually be coming to an end, but this... we'll see, we'll see.
Let's look at the articles.
Let's just jump right into it.
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This story from Recode, February 7th, 2019.
Twitter finally shared how big its daily user base is, and it's a lot smaller than Snapchat's.
Twitter has 126 million daily users, compared to Snap's 186 million.
It's also important to point out, this is global.
If the United States has 330 million people or so, 145 million or so in the workforce, then it would stand to reason that America may have the majority of these users, but it's still very small relative to the actual amount of people working in the U.S.
Recode asks, How big is Twitter's daily user base?
A lot smaller than Snapchat's, it turns out.
For years, Twitter has been asking investors to judge the company by looking at user growth for its daily active users.
But Twitter never shared how many daily active users it actually had, which made the year-over-year growth hard to appreciate.
That changed on Thursday, when Twitter shared its daily user total for the first time.
Twitter has 126 million daily users, which is 60 million fewer users than Snapchat.
That means roughly 39% of Twitter's monthly active users are on the app every day.
The new metric matters to Twitter because it paints a picture that Twitter is growing.
Twitter's monthly active user base, the user metric it has shared quarterly since its IPO in 2013, is shrinking and has been for some time.
So focusing on daily users instead of monthly users lets Twitter show that it's growing, which is a much happier story to tell.
In fact, Twitter said it will stop sharing the monthly active total altogether beginning this year.
Twitter will tell you that it's not fair to compare directly to Snapchat.
That's because Twitter says it's only counting users who could be exposed to ads, what it's referring to as its monetizable audience.
Snapchat, Twitter would argue, counts users who open the apps in a message and leave without ever getting to the part of the app where Snapchat serves ads.
Though in reality, it seems like someone could use Twitter for the same purpose.
It's not a super compelling argument, but if you want to find a defense for Twitter, at least its audience is still growing.
Snapchat's user base didn't grow at all in 2018.
Twitter's daily active user metric also gives us a sense of how much room Twitter has left to grow.
The company's monthly active user totals has been declining.
So barring a miraculous turnaround that suddenly drives a lot more new people to Twitter, the company is betting it can get more of those existing monthly users to open the app more often.
That can't go on forever, of course, but Twitter has a lot of room between its monthly and daily totals.
It seems like a clever way to convince people your platform is growing.
And it's actually not.
Well, maybe this is based on monthly active users versus daily users, and you could use whichever metric you want, but basically, what it sounds like they're saying is, Twitter has hundreds of millions of people, most of whom don't actually use the service.
They've signed up and they don't do anything.
Even among their active users, some people only take action within the app or on the website a couple times per month.
So you have the upper limit, this big, broad idea of monthly users.
Daily users are smaller than that.
So while their total monthly users are going down, there are some people who are using the app more and daily, so it looks like they're growing.
And this is the narrative that's been going on for quite some time.
In fact, back in November, we heard a similar story.
Twitter user growth remains stagnant as teens stay away.
We can see in this graph that from 2015 to 2018, there's actually been a decent decline.
Now, we did see an increase from 2016 into 2017, and I'd probably assume this has to do with Donald Trump.
He really put Twitter on the map in a huge way.
The news won't stop talking about it, and he got a bunch of older people to use the platform to see what he had to say.
We can see, however, that revenue growth, the lighter shade of blue, dropped dramatically up until 2017, where it's increased.
So this is important.
Twitter may be dying by some metrics.
They may be trying to use clever language to make it seem like they're not dying.
But so long as they can convince whatever people they have on the platform to use the platform more often, their revenue will grow, and this is good news for Twitter.
The story from PCMag points out that for nearly three years, their growth was completely stagnant as it pertains to monthly active users.
And as of now, it's actually taken a turn in the negative direction.
We may just be facing the beginning of the end, but in this graph, we can see the number of monthly active Twitter users in the United States from first quarter of 2010 to third quarter of 2018, and we can see it has just started to decline.
Now, maybe there's a lot of reasons for this.
I don't really know.
But I think this is why, recently, Jack Dorsey has decided to have so many conversations.
Something bad has happened, and they've started to lose users, and he's got to figure out how to fix this.
I want to highlight this post from r slash Twitter.
It doesn't have a whole lot of traction, it was never very big, but some random user, I don't want to put any false weight behind who they are, asked this question.
Is Twitter dying?
I'm actually serious.
I've noticed a lot of the people I was following don't tweet as much anymore, and the people who I thought was really funny now getting suspended without warning.
It's like every platform that has an opportunity to turn into something big ruins it by implementing BS rules.
Again, I want to stress, I don't think a random Twitter comment shows a trend or anything like that.
It's an annoying tactic media tends to do.
But I wanted to show this to just explain some sentiment you may see.
And I think the sentiment is prevalent among people associated with the right.
Why is Jack Dorsey doing these interviews with the intellectual dark web and people about conservatives?
Admittedly, the Joe Rogan podcast was for liberals talking about conservative bias, but sure.
I think the reason is there are people who are starting to recognize that funny people are being banned, people are being harassed.
Twitter is generally a really awful platform.
Why is Twitter so adamant about protecting journalists when the hashtag learn to code thing happened?
It's because they're the lifeblood of the platform, the most influential part of the platform, and they give Twitter meaning.
Look at all of these viral stories that were complete and utter nonsense that traveled far and wide because of Twitter.
Covington being the best example.
How many journalists wrote fake news because they saw a story on Twitter and did no research?
It is an addiction.
It's a bad platform.
it is. And with Jack Dorsey trying to constantly police conversations, it only makes it worse.
People then get upset that funny people get banned. We see parody accounts being banned,
and then they have to get reinstated. We see people unjustly suspended or banned, and they
have to complain to get reinstated. And this only really works for people who are high
profile. That means low-level users are being purged from the platform. I admit, Jack Dorsey
is between a rock and a hard place.
Their monthly active users have started to dip.
They've started offending certain people.
The bad PR about their bias is only getting worse.
And I don't think they're going to find a solution to this.
Because Jack does bring up a really good point in the podcast when he said he wants to figure out how to get as many people as possible to have healthy conversations.
That makes sense from a business point of view.
He needs more users to grow, to increase share price, to make money, to make sure that the platform doesn't collapse.
So he doesn't care about the ramifications on politics.
What he wants to do is maximize user growth and bring that money in.
But what does that mean for us?
The platform has gotten so big, it does have an impact on our politics.
And while it is a private platform and they have no obligation to guarantee access to anybody, at a certain point we have to recognize the detriment to the government.
Does Twitter have a right to user growth?
Absolutely not.
So if they're going to impact our politics and Jack wants to restrict certain legal speech because he wants to make his business grow, well then we have a serious problem.
I don't care about the private interests of a publicly traded company.
I care about the interests of our community and whether or not this will be healthy.
But I absolutely do want to bring up that there have been stories of people on the left getting banned.
This story from Boing Boing in September 29th, 2018.
Twitter suspends academic who quoted feminist STEM research.
This was a highly dubious suspension.
It made no sense and they said it was a mistake and they brought him back on.
While I still believe that people on the right are much more likely to be banned than people on the left, I want to just highlight this because it shows that Twitter has to contend with the fact that they're going to get flagged from the left for not being censorious enough, and for accidentally taking down people who shouldn't have been banned in the first place, and then they're going to get targeted by the right for being censorious.
All that Twitter cares about is a platform that makes people want to be on it.
Admittedly, I thought about this.
I don't care for the responses to my tweets anymore, so what's the point of the platform?
Why am I on Twitter?
Well, there's one thing it provides.
If you want to follow me on my day-to-day thoughts, I can tweet something and you can read it, but I gotta be honest, I don't really check replies all that often.
Why?
They're almost always nasty, abusive harassment.
Well, this plays into another problem Twitter has.
If Jack really wants to make the platform grow, if that's his intention, I'll admit there's a lot of assumptions here, it's me and my thoughts following the podcast.
Well, then he has to make sure that the people who go on the platform and take clips of me out of context and call me all these awful names can't do that.
Well, there's the problem.
In my opinion, they have the right to say these stupid things, and I don't think they should be banned, but then it makes it for a platform I don't want to be on.
I hate Twitter.
I really do.
I think it's useful in some ways, but I think it's way too damaging at this point.
And I don't know what its purpose is, other than it's an awful addiction that makes people seek validation by posting hot takes and makes them look like nasty, awful people.
That's all I see it doing.
But I want to make sure I talk a little bit more about the general demise of Silicon Valley.
Twitter may be dying, and in my opinion, I think it really is.
They're going to see business growth because they've got daily active users.
These are people who are tweeting more often.
While their monthly active users are dying off, some of those people who aren't dying off tweet more than they used to, so it looks like growth when it actually isn't.
But we also know from a recent story in the Daily Mail, Facebook lost 15 million millennial users since 2017.
And going back to the PCMag story, what do we see?
Snapchat is still widely used by young people, though its growth is stagnant.
Instagram has seen a massive increase in the past year or so, but Twitter isn't pulling anything off.
It looks like there was some growth potentially around when Donald Trump got elected, but now we can see even Facebook is going down the drain.
I gotta be honest, I have no idea how these companies can turn it around.
Maybe they can't.
Maybe that's the point.
Our culture has shifted, and there is so much wrong with what Twitter is at its core, it cannot be fixed.
Think about the options we have for what Twitter is.
People are nasty and awful, and I don't like being on it, because when I click my notifications, it's nothing but abuse and harassment.
There are a lot of good comments, too.
Don't get me wrong.
But there are people tweeting awful things about me, Dave Rubin, and others.
So why should I bother being on the platform?
Out of sight, out of mind.
I don't post my YouTube videos there anymore because all that does is alert people who hate me to go to my YouTube videos and flag it.
So I don't want to be on the platform while still recognizing that people on the platform have a right to be mean and have a right to say awful things.
So what do we do?
If Twitter gets rid of all their rules and just stops enforcing anything, it's not going to make the platform more fun or usable for anybody.
But if they think censoring people for having opinions and letting algorithms run wild is going to solve the problem, it won't.
I don't think Twitter can solve the problem.
I think it's always going to be a hellscape of hateful nastiness that makes me not want to use it.
I don't know about you.
I'm sure there are some people who like it, but I have to imagine, if they just opened the floodgates, maybe all that we would see is a bunch of people screaming at each other, and it would make things worse?
I really don't know.
What I do know is, you cannot have a platform that influences our politics, while still banning legal speech.
At the same time, they've got a problem with hate.
They really, really do.
And I don't mean the left-wing version of what hate is, I mean the actual definition.
It's just mean people saying mean things all the time, and it makes Twitter awful.
But to make it worse, I can understand that people are going to be mean.
I can understand they're going to tweet at me and say mean things.
I accept that.
But when I'm not allowed to respond, because I'll get banned, when certain people in the political debate in a certain faction, you see where I'm going, if they're getting banned when they respond and say things like, in Megan Murphy's case, men aren't women though, then why would any of us want to be on your hate platform when we're not allowed to defend ourselves?
It's trash.
I don't know the solution is, so Jack, I'm sorry.
I really just don't know.
But it looks like Twitter might be, you know, slowly dying off to a certain extent.
Maybe they should.
Maybe they should shrink.
Maybe the answer isn't for Twitter to exist in the first place.
Maybe regulation isn't the answer because Twitter should go out of business and we should find alternate platforms to use.
What's interesting about Instagram is that Instagram doesn't reward you for being an asshole.
Twitter does.
On Twitter, when you post that rage, that hateful content, people retweet it because it emotionally satisfies them.
That's a part of the problem.
While this can aid in the aspect of discovery for new personalities, new artists, it also
creates a problem for hateful people to inflame the culture or to make things worse because
it will get them clicks, it will make them celebrities among their faction and that's
a huge problem.
Maybe Twitter needs to act more like Instagram, I honestly have no idea.
But until then, it looks like Twitter and Facebook are losing their foothold.
But as of right now, I think it's fair to point out, Twitter absolutely does have massive
influence.
And I read something recently that said, Twitter users, Twitter followers are the most valuable
of any follower on any platform.
So long as journalists use Twitter to write their stories, and those stories impact our culture, Twitter is very, very important.
But maybe all Twitter will be in the future is a small utility where the average person can see what high-profile people are talking about, and that's really it.
Maybe Twitter isn't supposed to grow and become this massive public square for the world.
Maybe it's just supposed to be a bulletin board.
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
This was kind of a, I don't know, a rant on some of the issues as I'm thinking about the podcast, and there's a lot of things I missed, I admit, and I'm just not perfect, you know, so I appreciate everybody who sent compliments my way, and I am hearing your criticism.
It's all I can really do.
Comment below.
Let me know what you think.
We'll keep the conversation going.
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