Offline with Jon Favreau - Elon’s Twitter is in the Sh*tter with Nilay Patel

Episode Date: November 6, 2022

Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge and host of the Decoder podcast, talks with Jon about Elon Musk’s newest and thorniest business venture: purchasing Twitter. In a recent article, “Welcome to Hell, Elon,” Patel describes the quandary that awaits the Tesla founder and argues that Musk has made a historic mistake. He joins Offline to talk Musks’ misguided free speech promises, the limits of technical solutions to political problems, and the hubris of an internet troll-turned-King Twit. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

I saw David Sachs tweet this yesterday that he's like, well, should, you know, the Atlantic and the New York Times and all these subscription paid sites, like, should they just give away their content for free? Is that what you're all saying? Who don't want to pay for Twitter Blue? And I'm like, yeah, but this is the opposite. Yeah. We're providing the content for Twitter. All of us. Yeah. And they're now saying that you have to pay to provide the content for Twitter? There's a real part of this. You can't pin it down. But there's a real part of this where all this is extremely well explained if you just realize that they're all fucking addicted to Twitter. Like their brains are poisoned and their addiction is deep and they think everyone wants cigarettes just as much as they do.

And it's like, actually, I don't. I don't need you know, like, I don't need this so bad. I have to pay you. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. My guest today is Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge and host of the podcast Decoder. You may have heard that Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter finally went through. As of this recording on Friday, Elon has owned Twitter for all of eight days. And what a time it's been. The platform's new owner remains one of its biggest trolls, tweeting out debunked conspiracies about Paul Pelosi, getting in fights with AOC, and generally doing whatever he can to make himself Twitter's main character as often as possible. He's also making

some actual business moves. He's firing a lot of the staff, trying to keep advertisers on board with mixed success, and he plans to charge users $8 a month for a blue checkmark. Of course, we had to talk about it. So I asked The Verge's Nilay Patel to join me. Earlier this week, Nilay wrote a viral piece titled, Welcome to Hell, Elon. He makes the case that the problems with Twitter aren't engineering problems, but political problems, and that Elon's free speech promises won't be easy to keep at a company whose chief product is content moderation. Why? Because people don't want to participate in hellish, unmoderated social networks. They want pleasant, validating experiences.

Nilay thinks that the more unpleasant Elon makes Twitter, the more doomed the site becomes. So, could this be the end of Twitter? We talked about what the future might hold for the platform, its outsized influence on politics and media, and the new era of social media we may be entering. As always, if you have comments, questions, or concerns, please email us at offline at crooked.com and do please rate, review, and share the show. Here's Nilay Patel.

Nilay Patel, welcome to Offline. Hey, thanks for having me. Glad to finally have you on. I think it's apropos that we finally have an offline discussion about Elon Musk and all the craziness at Twitter. I know you've been covering that for the last couple of days. You wrote in The Verge what I consider to be the definitive piece about Twitter's new owner. The title was Welcome to Hell, Elon. It starts, You fucked up real good, kiddo.

Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself. And there's no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies. For folks who haven't read the piece, can you explain why you think Elon is in such a bind? Yeah. It's easy to write the definitive piece when it's just everything all of the trust and safety professionals in the world are quietly saying to themselves. So I don't want to take too much credit for it. I just added swear words. That's what I do on the podcast all the time. It's fine. It works.

It's great. Here's the problem with Twitter. Twitter is really small. We often forget this. We lump Twitter in with Facebook and Google and Snapchat and whatever. Twitter has 229 million monetizable daily active users. The number of people who show up on the service and that Twitter can serve ads to. By the way, Elon tried to get out of the deal by claiming that number was fraudulent. So he believes potentially that that number is even smaller 229 million facebook has 2 billion users i know and tiktok it's like it's in tiktok tiktok is huge everyone on the planet has watched the youtube video right like the the scale that this platform operates at is so small compared to its competitors that if you want to make a lot of money with it, or you just want it to be

self-sustaining in some realistic way, you have to add a lot of people to the platform. To add a lot of people to any social platform, you got to make it nice. It's just got to be a nice experience. And to make a social platform a nice experience, you have to moderate the shit out of the content on it. And he's out there talking about free speech. So he's just stuck. He's made a bunch of promises that he can't keep without losing a ton of money. Do you think it's purely a content moderation problem or are there other factors at play? Obviously, Twitter had been losing users even before Elon took over. Why was it losing users? Is it just because of even though they had a bunch of content moderation policies in place, it wasn't good

enough? Yeah. My thesis in the piece, which comes at the end, this is not how you should structure a piece. This is the real editor-in-chief of me coming at. The thesis of the piece is buried at the end, right? It's not Elon's going to fail. The thesis of the piece is that the product a social network makes is content moderation. And if you don't recognize that early, you're always going to be chasing after flashy features, filters, or whatever, instead of realizing that the user experience that somebody opening your app is having is totally determined by a series of decisions you make that incentivize some content and disincentivize some other content. Social network CEOs are not in control of their apps. The users are in control of those apps. All they can do is align some incentives to get the things

they want to have happen, happen. So YouTube, for example, in order to get a mid-roll ad slot in a YouTube video, you've got to be around eight to 10 minutes. Right? So almost all YouTube videos are 10 minutes long. That's a decision that YouTube made. They're going to prioritize a watch time on the platform. So they wanted longer videos. How do we make everybody make longer videos? We'll put a pot of gold at 10 minutes. That's content moderation. It's straight up. That is the design of the product is content moderation.

We don't think about it that way because when you talk about content moderation, we think about taking stuff down or hate speech or whatever, but it is as much recommending content or incentivizing creators or all this other stuff that fills in the boxes of the app. Elon has no plan to incentivize creators. Twitter had no plan to incentivize people to participate in Twitter. You show up on Twitter. You post a tweet. Everyone yells at you and that's your life.

Right? People get rich on TikTok. Warby Parker is an entire company that exists because of Instagram's advertising platform. That's not a thing you can do on Twitter. The only people who build their businesses on Twitter are like sub stackers. So it's clear, I think, to everyone that Elon did not have a master plan or much of a theory when he took over this platform but like let's say you know just for the sake of argument a couple weeks from now a month from now he's like okay i'm in the content moderation business like he has made some initial moves that suggest at least that he wants to try to keep

advertisers on board you know he he tweeted he doesn't want to make the platform a free-for-all hellscape he's reportedly meeting with advertisers soon. And he said he plans on creating a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints are his rewards. Like, do you think it's possible this could work? How would this work? I think it's possible it could work. You know, most social networks at the scale of Twitter,

and Twitter, again, is very small, but once you hit Twitter's scale and it's sort of import, you arrive at a kind of steady state of content moderation, right? You say we're not going to allow hate speech on the platform. We're not going to allow open sexism on the platform. Twitter is a little bit more permissive with nudity than other platforms and adult content than other platforms. Sure. But there's a bunch of stuff that all the platforms say they can't do. Copyright law is an enormous exception to free speech in this country. You cannot do anything with Mickey Mouse that you want. Like the Disney corporation will show up and tell you that that's got to come down

and everyone complies and no one bats an eye about it. The platforms comply with the copyright law of the country and they take a bunch of stuff down because corporations want them to. If you were a more strident free speech advocate, you would point out that this is a stunning are extraordinarily outside the bounds of our First Amendment. Germany has a hate speech law that basically says it has to come down right away. Canada has some proposed laws that would register journalists for access to the government. The Indian government requires social platforms to have employees in the country so that if they make a demand about blocking or restricting access to content, they can put them in jail. You have to provide the Indian government with potential hostages so that their threats aren't taken more seriously. The Iranian government will just kill people.

They'll just issue the death penalty over social media posts. So if your context for a service like Twitter is the American First Amendment, you're quickly going to realize the world does not give a shit about the First Amendment. And you are quickly going to realize that the compromises you make to satisfy the advertisers on Twitter and to comply with all the laws around the world are going to immediately piss off all of the people on the right that you've made all these free speech promises to. And if they take the House in the midterms or they take both the House and the Senate, the Elon Musk committee hearing is going to be like an all-timer because they're going to hold him to account for saying, you promised us free speech and now you've got this council with liberals on it. Or now you're kowtowing to the demands of Iran. You're even kowtowing to the

demands of Germany, which doesn't allow Nazis on the platform. I mean, he's got to walk a very fine line here. Yeah. And you also point out that, you know, you talked about all the international challenges. You know, you argue in the piece that a real threat to free speech is our own government, particularly laws in Texas and Florida that tell social media companies like Twitter how to operate. Like, you think Elon's going to be a free speech warrior when it comes to taking on his pal Ron DeSantis who he wants to run for president in 2024 yeah I don't think so I think that might be

the hardest piece of this puzzle for him uh we actually we have another piece by our senior reporter Eddie Robertson today about the threats that the first amendment from our governments it really feels like politicians in this country have realized they really want to regulate big tech in some way. It's a political winner for them. And they have run straight into the brick wall of the First Amendment because it turns out most of the big tech companies they dislike are not doing anything other than providing social media platforms to other people.

So they would really like to regulate what's happening on these social media platforms. The problem is the companies have First Amendment rights of their own. No politician in America is going to say the First Amendment is too broad. So they have found all these other ways to overcome the barrier of the First Amendment, most notably by talking about Section 230. Every time they threaten 230, it's a backdoor to saying, change your moderation policies to suit me, or I will remove this thing that even allows your company to exist. If you don't do what I want, I will unleash a torrent of litigation that no company can withstand. Can you, for people who don't know, because we haven't really dug into 230 here, because people just hear politicians say, like, get rid of 230.

What would that mean? In practice, what does it mean if 230 doesn't exist? So 230 is famously 26 words long. It says no interactive computer service provider will be liable for what users of that service provider publish. It basically says if you post a tweet, Twitter is not liable for the content of your tweets. It's like a super simple law. And there's like a long history that maybe the courts would have come to this conclusion on their own. If you run a bookstore, are you liable for the contents of the books that you sell? Like it's a hard question, right?

And it seems like the courts were headed towards no. Like that doesn't make any sense. Well, if you take that away and you say Twitter is now liable for everything that its users publish, actually what's going to happen is Twitter is going to moderate even more. They're going to turn the heat way up. They're going to take more stuff down. They're going to pre-review everything. They're basically going to try to tamp down on that liability. In the meantime though, anybody who's pissed off about a tweet is not going to sue the person who posted the tweet.

They're going to sue Twitter because Twitter has the money. So Twitter's legal costs will skyrocket. That's an existential threat to most of the social media companies, right? If they become liable for everything their users do, they probably can't exist in the way that they exist right now. So if you're Joe Biden or you're Donald Trump, you have the exact same position on 230, which is you run around talking about how it should be repealed, which both Biden and Trump do. They have the exact same position. This law should be repealed. The reason they have that position is because they're basically saying to YouTube, to Twitter, to Facebook, to whoever, do what I want or I will destroy your company.

I will unleash a torrent of defamation lawsuits, which may not be supported by the evidence. But basically anybody in the world who's pissed about a tweet can now sue you if I get rid of this law. Or you could just delete some COVID misinformation and I'll shut the fuck up. Or you stop moderating Republicans as much when they say hateful shit and I'll shut the fuck up. Or you stop moderating Republicans as much when they say hateful shit. I'll shut the fuck up. And it's not subtle if you're paying attention. They're wielding an existential threat over the companies. So they will change their moderation policies. Do you think there are sensible regulations or laws that the government could pass that don't run afoul of the First Amendment to sort of help regulate these social media companies in terms of some of the like more hateful, violent content that comes out of them?

I think there's a pretty big spectrum. The first is that these companies are so opaque. What are people really mad about? Like stuff happens to you and you have no idea why. There's this joke that I tell all the time. Most people are more aware of the copyright policy on YouTube than they are of the speed limit five miles away from their house, right? Because it's in your face all the time. Stuff gets taken down. Your favorite creators are complaining. The end point of every YouTube creator is a video about how pissed they are at YouTube.

It's just like that's the cycle you're in. So you're just like deeply aware of these policies that are enforced, that are enacted, that are happening to people, that are happening to people that you have these parasocial relationships with on these platforms. If you're going five miles over or five miles from your house, nothing happens to you. So you're more aware of the corporate policies that you live under than maybe the government policies that you live under. And there's no transparency. You have no control. You have no way of pushing back. There's no market force.

They all feel like these oppressive monopolies. So the first run is just make the process more transparent. Require these companies to be much, much more transparent about the trade they're making with both their users and their creators, right? These are contracts. Enforce some contract law. Make some rules about what those contracts should and should not say. There's some stuff you can do in the middle around, I think Amy Klobuchar has called the Earn It Act, where you have to take down some horrible content in order to achieve the 230 protections. That's sort of the middle ground.

That stuff has some First Amendment implications that are real too. And then sort of like the farthest field is to do the thing that free market capitalists want to do in America, which is, well, just add some competition to this system so people can leave, right? Like if you could just bail on Twitter, Twitter would immediately adopt the transparency provisions. If you could bail on YouTube, they would be immediately more responsive to their creators. But in their little silos, they are oppressive monopolies. There's nowhere else to go.

So either you can regulate the monopoly, which I think has all kinds of issues, or you can pass some antitrust laws or some competition laws to make sure that the market can regulate itself appropriately. So we've been talking about sort of the challenges that anyone running a social media platform would face. Obviously, there are particular challenges that Elon Musk is going to face. Bloomberg reported that in the first two days after he took over, there was a 1700% spike in racist slurs, and that the Twitter team with access to content moderation and enforcement tools was reduced to 15 people. Twitter's head of safety and integrity,

Yul Roth, said that none of their policies have changed. They removed like 1500 accounts, and that the smaller team is temporary because of the transition. What did you make of those stories, those early stories? You get what you pay for. I think Elon tweeted that today, right? He did. You break it. You buy it.

Many cliches. He should have expected the massive surge in bad behavior. He walked into this saying Twitter moderates too much. You have to know what's coming. It does not appear that he's made the dramatic cuts to trust and safety yet. He hasn't really made many cuts yet. He's fired a bunch of executives and people are quitting, but he hasn't made the cuts yet. And he does have front facing trust and safety people like Yul Roth saying the rules have not changed, and he's retweeting them.

The problem is that he told everyone he was going to change the rules. He's got to pull that band-aid off at some point. And if you look at the other reports, massive advertisers are pausing their spending on Twitter. So IPG, which is a massive conglomerate holding company for advertising agencies, said, hold up. We don't think we should spend money here yet. GM, which is company for advertising agencies, said, hold up. We don't think we should spend money here yet. GM, which is a competitor to Tesla, said, hold up. We don't know.

We want our ads to be in a safe place. Maybe they're just tweaking Tesla a bit. Who knows? But the advertisers need to know what the rules are going to be. So the revenue is at risk unless they keep the rules as they are, which is more or less what they have been saying to advertisers. That is not what he's saying to his new right-wing fan club. And so he's already getting tweets about his new moderation council. It's like, what happened to freedom of speech?

He's already facing the scrutiny from the right about his commitment to freedom of speech. And I think that balance eventually, like I said, he's got to pull the bandaid off and say, these are new rules and the new rules aren't necessarily going to have prohibitions on hate speech, on sexism, on transphobia, because that's what the money wants. And the money is going to be way more important than a handful of right-wing influencers. Well, see, that raises another question, because either he ends up with almost the same content moderation policies that Twitter had before he took over, maybe some tweaks here and there, just so he can tell his new right wing you think there's a way he can sustain the business with like a combination of user fees and the kind of advertisers

that now run on right-wing platforms? I don't know that there's enough supplement revenue in the world to pay for Twitter at scale. Got it. I keep saying it's small. It's small, but it's big, right? It operates at scale globally. You need the army of lawyers

to just show up and fend off governments around the world. That's just their job every day. They take the request from governments to do things that would otherwise imperil freedom of speech and they say no. And they have to like concoct legal arguments that the EU will buy. If you're a free speech warrior, that's actually the job, right? And the Twitter administration under Jack, under Parag, under Vijaya didn't get enough credit for how much they fend off constantly. I think the reason Jack turned into a weird like wizard, like hippie guy. Always in the woods. Right, because he was just constantly under – like you need to be that zen and that in control of yourself to just face the pressure of governments around the world saying this is what we'd like you to do with Twitter.

So I don't know that there's enough revenue to hire lawyers at that scale of that caliber to get engineers at that scale of that caliber to participate in this project when your advertising base is the MyPillow guy. And I think that this is just going to be a real problem for him. And he has said, you know, he put his open letter out to advertisers, right? We want to be the best advertising platform in the world. We don't want it to be a hellscape. And they are saying to advertisers now, it's business as usual, no changes, which the advertisers I've talked to, they're like, yeah, like we can see what's happening. So I think they're in for a real bumpy ride here in terms of the money. And I don't think they can shift it. They'd have to charge like $200 a month at their scale to run Twitter.

Well, yeah, I was going to say, so we should talk about Twitter blue, which is Elon's first big revenue generating move. So for $8 a month, Elon says you get a blue check mark, priority in replies, mentions in search, ability to post long video and audio and half as many ads. He also said there's going to be a secondary tag below the name for someone who's a public figure, which is already the case for politicians. What do you make of this? It's obviously a better deal than $20 for just a blue checkmark, but do you think enough users will sign up to generate substantial revenue for Twitter? Is this at all worth it or what?

Well, so the number of verified users that we can presently determine is like 400,000 people. So assuming you get all 400,000 of those people, you still haven't made $100 million a year. Like, you're kind of like not even close, right? Yeah. That's nothing. Like, Twitter makes $4 billion a year. So you haven't even moved the needle on your quarterly revenue, let alone your annual revenue. Now, I think the play here is he's going to open it up to everybody.

So he assumes lots of people are going to pay for this blue checkmark, get ranked higher in replies and search and all this stuff. But like now you've just created tsa pre-check right like you can have a good experience on twitter if you pay some money or you can be in steerage and like the bots will come for you and who knows like maybe maybe all social networks should do this and maybe this is like an untapped well of people like tsa pre-check from what i can tell is very successful you know people like clear but like the analogy to me is yeah you you've made first class and coach and it turns out like the coach cabin fills up first right so we'll just see like i i think this is a pretty remarkable experiment in running a social network this way but he's basically promising unless you pay you're gonna

have a worse experience on twitter yeah that's interesting because I think a lot of people reacted to it as I sort of did when I first heard it. Like, why are we now paying Elon for this fucking blue check mark that like, who cares? Yeah. You know, but if it's two classes of experience, like how, I guess if you don't have the blue check mark, how is that worse? So the bots come for you. You don't get prioritized. What does it look like for a stratified system like that? I don't think that they know yet. I think the funniest thing about this is watching this group of effectively venture capitalists become product managers again and scramble their way through it. They don't know what they're doing. Because that's his counsel. It's basically a bunch of VCs.

David Sachs. Yeah. Jason Calacanis. I know Jason. Well, he started Engadget where I started my career. He's a smart guy. He's an investor. Right.

And now they've got to actually manage a product and manage it out. Um, so, I mean, we'll see. I think that fundamentally all the biggest, most successful platforms in the world pay their top creators, not the other way around. Yeah, that's, that's, and I saw David Sachs tweet this yesterday that he's like, well, should, you know, the Atlantic and the New York times and all these subscription paid sites, like, should they just give away their content for free?

Is that what you're all saying? Who don't want to pay for Twitter blue? And I'm like, yeah, but this is the opposite. Yeah, this we're providing the content for Twitter. Is that what you're all saying? Who don't want to pay for Twitter blue? And I'm like, yeah, but this is the opposite. Yeah. This we're providing the content for Twitter. All of us. Yeah. And they're now saying that you have to pay to provide the content for

Twitter. There's a real part of this. Yeah. You can't pin it down, but there's a real part of this where all this is extremely well explained. If you just realize that they're all fucking addicted to Twitter, like their brains are poisoned and their addiction is deep and they think everyone wants cigarettes just as much as they do and it's like actually i don't you know like i don't need

this so bad i have to pay you and i think they're betting on a lot of people needing it so bad they have to pay them we'll see i i just look around and youtube is a juggernaut that has built careers for people like rewarding multi-million dollar mr beast exists because of youtube not twitter i mean he's going to become like the next like legendary American entrepreneur story because of YouTube. I mentioned Warby Parker earlier, all those DTC brands, Casper, whatever it is, they all exist because of Instagram and the Instagram tools. There are so many influencers that exist because of Instagram and the brand partnerships and the promotions that Instagram enabled for them. TikTok is the same. Charlie D'Amelio exists, right?

That is a TikTok story. That is a TikTok monetization story. There's none of that on Twitter. The only thing Twitter has ever come close to achieving like that is sub-stackers. The vast majority of whom get their audience to convert to sub-stack from Twitter. That's great. More power to them. But on the other hand, the other platforms are like world-changing entrepreneurs, entirely new classes of celebrity in America, and then like Substackers. It's just like a weird mix.

And they've all achieved that by directly paying huge amounts of money to those creators, not charging them for access to an audience. Your point about this just being a bunch of Twitter addicts taken over is so right. I mean, I'm a Twitter addict, but like my secret hope for all of this has been like, yeah, make the platform awful. And then that will end my addiction because then I won't be there anymore. Yeah. I mean, it's like make the cigarettes taste worse.

That's probably going to be better. My life's going to be better. Look, I like the idea that it's a news curation service that I can scroll and figure out what everyone's talking about in the news. Everything else about it sucks at this point. Yeah. I mean, I'm not saying Twitter has not created massive amounts of cultural capital. Wired did an entire package of stories on black Twitter and where it came from and how it drives the culture. That is real, right? It has given voice to many groups of historically disenfranchised people in a way that they

didn't have. That's where wokeism comes from. I have a t-shirt that Jack Dorsey gave me at a code conference. It says stay woke with a Twitter logo on it. That's where that came from, right? Is these huge masses of underrepresented people having a platform that quickly hit other massively influential people across the media. Yeah, no, we did a whole episode with DeRay McKesson on that, on Black Lives Matter and how Twitter was like very responsible for that movement.

Yeah. None of them got paid shit for it by Twitter. Right. Like just be real. Like Twitter allocated no capital to them. It just happened on the platform and Twitter took credit for it. And Jack got to wear his t-shirt and be on many stages with the jury. And now he's gone. And the new ownership of Twitter is like, fuck woke people. And like,

maybe it would be different if they had an economic relationship to each other the way that youtube again all the other platforms have their have economic relationships with their creators that keep them in line that make them responsible that make them responsive to the people who make the content on the platform and i think this is like the opposite economic relationship we're all going to become customers of Twitter, which just implies many, many different things, but it also implies that Elon is now our customer support representative. You know, some people I've heard on the left say, like, one outcome here is that Twitter just becomes much more of a

right wing platform and has more, you know, sort of right wing views and spreads disinformation like some other right wing sites. And, you know, like what happens when Elon violates his company's own content moderation policies, right? Like over the weekend, he tweeted out a conspiracy about Paul Pelosi's attack. He then, of course, you know, deleted the tweet after half a day, even though it had been seen by hundreds of thousands of people without any kind of comment. I also noticed that now, in the last couple of days, Twitter has been like adding fact checks, sort of context checks to some, you know, like the White House had a couple tweets and they like, you know, said, oh, well, Joe Biden made this claim about

Social Security, but here's the actual context. And it just made me wonder, like, how are they going to handle misinformation, disinformation? And are they going to handle it in a way that favors, you know, Elon and Elonon's right-wing friends and the various conspiracies that are out there yeah you know a big chunk of my piece is just laying out the fact that elon does not have engineering problems with twitter he has political problems and what you're describing is lawyer stuff like like lawyers are going to lawyer this out like and then the amateur lawyers on twitter no matter what he does are going to read the rules and i mean it already happens but now there's a face to it and a face who's addicted to twitter so i do think yeah it's

going to swing a little bit more permissive I think there was already a report that he wants them to review the rules around deadnaming trans people. Right. I don't think that's great. But is it going to happen? Like, it's probably going to happen. Are we all going to have to deal with it? Is that collection of people and people who think that

trans people should be made to feel safe thinking about leaving Twitter because of it when it does happen and that abuse is rolled at them? I don't know. At the same time, you know, he's got his people out there saying the rules haven't changed and it needs to be a safe place without hateful conduct. Those ideas are in massive tension with each other. And so if he wants to grow the user base, like let's just think of it this way. Let's say you sign up for Twitter today because you are curious about what's happening here.

And you post your first tweet. There's like three things that can happen to you. One, the worst outcome is nothing. You put, right?

Like nothing. No one sees it. Everyone's worst nightmare. Like, not abuse or harassment, just no affirmation. Yeah, nothing. Whatsoever.

No feedback loop occurs. You write your first tweet, you think it's a banger, no likes, no retweets, no impressions. That's the most likely case. Second is someone sees it and you get like a little bit of attention and maybe you're inspired to do it again. And then the third thing, maybe actually the worst thing, is that the shit goes viral and suddenly Fox News is doing entire segments about your bad day at Starbucks.

Right? Like those are the three outcomes for you on Twitter. Two of them are hopelessly negative. They make you never want to do it again. One of them is like completely underappreciated. Like Twitter has no ramp to go

from a little bit to a lot or a little bit of attention to a lot of good attention. I don't think they have a plan for like, come join Twitter and have a good experience. And I think that's why Twitter is bleeding users because most people have negative experiences. And it's why most people have no desire to sign up for this platform. You can just go make TikToks where all you have to do is copy a popular dance or do a popular meme with your friends and use like commercial audio that is provided for you by the biggest artists in the world. And you have a good experience, like on balance, you have a good experience. And that platform is so heavily moderated that, you know, like when you have a good experience, it's mostly good. And I don't think that Elon has a plan for this should be a nicer place to be because what you need to do is

go from 229 million monetizable daily users to 2 billion. And you need to find all of those people and bring them on your platform, make them have a nice time. And that is just going to require him to be TikTok, and TikTok isn't a social network. If you wanted to start a social network, this would be the best time in 10 years to try that. Do you agree? To an extent. You know, I think there's a reason every social network is racing to copy TikTok. It's where the action is. It's where particularly the action from young people is. For as much as everyone hates Facebook and for as many dollars as Zuck is spending on the metaverse, their numbers have ticked up a little bit in the last quarter.

Like the boomers and Gen X, they're not leaving Facebook. It's where the school schedules are. They're there. So I think there's – it feels maybe a little bit more dire than it actually is, right? The social networks have found where they provide utility and they've settled into those identities as utility providers. What we're kind of losing is this like live wire. Do you ever use this phrase like I'm checking the internet and what you mean is Twitter? Right?

This like live wire pulse that's a little bit of a free-for-all, a little bit like everyone can be the main character, a little bit, you know, I'm just watching a football game and I can like find football Twitter and like I can just see an immediate conversation. That does feel like it is in peril, which I think is causing people to overreact. And I do think that if you wanted to start a competitor, this would be a good time to do it because you would be drafting off a very healthy response, which is what are my alternatives? Can I change my behavior? And I'm actually quite hopeful that this causes a lot of people to reconsider the value of social media in their lives. Like we are over-indexed on Twitter as a society, as a political establishment, as a media establishment. We spend too much time talking to ourselves on the smallest platform. It would be better if we found different platforms and different experiences in different ways. or just reacting to this so strongly is there is that desire for this like sense of community that's always where people are always talking to each other and everyone's like in on the action

right that's sort of one reason i actually like twitter and that partly i think is a consequence of like the way that media has changed in the way television has changed too right like we all used to watch similar programming now it's like live sporting events, you know, maybe award shows here and there, but like there's no place where people, you know, are coming together and talking all the time. And Twitter is that for a lot of people,

but it's just become a miserable experience. And I do wonder if it's even possible at this point, because now like Elon or not, it's just really hard as you point out to have content moderation policies that work to like to give people a nice time on these platforms that are social media platforms I mean like you mentioned TikTok but that's again that's not a social media platform and I just wonder if it's even possible at this point to like create a

social media platform where people actually can have a nice time and it doesn't devolve into what Twitter and Facebook have devolved into. I guess I'm curious about the claim that TikTok is not a social media platform. What do you mean by that? I guess it's because you're not, unlike Twitter, unlike Facebook, I mean, the algorithm is sort of serving you up stuff that's personally recommended to you. i feel like it's much more of an individualized experience on tiktok than it is like you're not constantly in communication with like some big group of people on tiktok yeah i sort of agree with that and i sort of don't so the part i don't agree with i think is simple which is most social networks are showing most people some algorithmically curated collection of things

that no one else has ever seen. So most people exist on the Twitter home timeline. It's just showing them good tweets. And that is like every product manager, engineer that has ever worked at any social network will tell you everyone says they want the algorithmic timeline. Everyone uses the home timeline because it just surfaces the good stuff.

So there's an extent to which TikTok is just that to the nth degree, right? It's just the most that. The thing that I think is correct is that Twitter, the barrier to entry is so low compared to everything else. You just got to type back at someone and it shows up and it looks the same as the thing that they made. And then all the same buttons are there. And there's a real flattening on Twitter that I think is important between that sort of like the speaker and the responder between the blue check and the

not YouTube is not like that at all. It's like really hard to make a YouTube video, but YouTube is definitely a social network. It is also by the way, the world's second largest search engine. Like YouTube is all these things at once. If you ask YouTube executives, they fully know that they run one of the world's biggest music services because mostly what people do on YouTube is watch music videos, which is not how any normal consumer of YouTube thinks of it. I am now using a competitor to Spotify, but YouTube executives

know that that's what that is. So there's like all these ways to conceive of these things. But YouTube is still a social network, right? You can reply to the videos. You can make your own videos and participate. Like it has all the dynamics of it. TikTok, I think, is the one step farther where it's much easier to make a TikTok, right? The most important part of the TikTok app is the video creation tools.

That is one of the most powerful video editing the tiktok app is the video creation tools that is one of the most powerful video editing apps that exist in the world today and they give away for free to incentivize you to participate and i i think i'm a little older if you're not in it you don't see that this is a social dynamic that is happening you're not just consuming it you are often too old you're prompted to create think about this way uh Twitter, if you tell the same joke as someone else, like you suck at Twitter, like anything happens in the world and everyone races to tell like the most obvious joke. Jokes are all done in about five minutes. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. And like, that's kind of cringe and bad. On TikTok, you are absolutely encouraged to do the same thing as everyone else. They have removed the barrier to create by offering you the template and saying, this is what you should do. This is the trend. Just do this trend. Tell this joke, do this dance, whatever, use this sound. They've offered you a way to create that's much easier than every other platform because they're just telling you what to do or they're incentivizing you to do the same thing and they're making that socially acceptable so i think there's just a real social dynamic to

you show up and they're like make this thing people will like it here are all the tools to make it and it will go into a feed and everyone will like watch the same five seconds of audio with everyone doing the same dance and that is a a phenomenon. That doesn't happen on Twitter. If you participate in a phenomenon on Twitter, you kind of suck at Twitter. Nilay Patel, thank you so much for joining Offline. We're having this conversation on Wednesday, and it comes out on Sunday. Who knows what Elon will have done by then?

Will Twitter exist? Will Twitter exist? Yeah, we don't even know. It was great having you on, though. Thanks for doing this. Thanks for having me. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau.

It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Amelia Montooth, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Narmel Konian, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.