Blog by Nilesh

twitter

I have a strong dislike for how all social networks today mess up the ‘feed’ section in a way that is plainly user hostile, and detrimental to user experience. Facebook, Instagram, Reddit—they are all guilty of this. I know it helps drive engagement, serve more ads, and make more money in the short term, but time is a finite resource, and when you employ every trick in the book to waste your users’ time, the only possible result is that over time (heh) you start losing users.

Twitter was one space where things used to be better: Twitter was about who you followed, so the concept of ‘recommended posts’ was new to the platform. But the company started with a ‘someone you follow liked this’ recommendation system, and now, somewhat recently, although I’m not sure exactly when, has started making topic based recommendations by inserting posts into the main Twitter feed for all users.

I get why Twitter (as well as others) do this, but Twitter is in some ways a special broadcast and community collaboration platform. It goes far beyond being just a social media platform in that sense.

So when Twitter does this annoying thing of injecting stuff into my feed that I have not actively opted in for, it gets, well, annoying.

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Less than two weeks after taking over Twitter, Elon Musk undertook the brutal, unpleasant task of downsizing. While rumors originally said that he'd downsize staff by as much as 75%, it looks like ultimately ended up pulling off a Thanos type snap, and reducing the Twitter staff population by about 50%.

Twitter has been struggling, lost and in trouble for a while, so I do hope under Musk things change, and Twitter finds a new direction. The odds aren't great, but let's hope.

What surprised me in all this though, was the way Musk was vilified for undertaking the layoffs at all.

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