Tech Won't Save Us - Elon Musk Is Destroying Twitter w/ Matt Binder

Episode Date: May 4, 2023

Paris Marx is joined by Matt Binder to discuss Elon Musk’s first six months at Twitter and how his obsession with blue checks has decimated the company’s finances. Matt Binder is a reporter at Mashable and the host of Scam Economy and Doomed. Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattBinder.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network. Also mentioned in this episode:Matt wrote about how few people are signing up for Twitter Blue, the people subscribing to Musk’s tweets, the Block the Blue campaign, and whether Bluesky will challenge Twitter.Paris wrote about what a recent BBC interview tells us about Musk’s knowledge of what’s happening on Twitter and what his history tells us about his plans for Twitter.Twitter revenue from its top 10 advertisers dropped 89% from September-October to March-April.William Shatner said his trip to space left him with “among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered.”After Musk gave many high-profile users blue checks again, many wonder if he could be sued for false endorsement since they haven’t actually paid for the service.Support the show

In their view, the thing that has been holding them back this whole time is that they did not have the blue check and that it was the blue check that made these users big. They have it completely backwards. And it's kind of hilarious that they see someone like Beyonce and they don't think to themselves, oh, Beyonce got the blue check because she's a huge global phenomenon, huge superstar. No, they think that, oh, Beyonce is as big as she is on this platform because she has the blue check. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Mars. And before we get into this week's episode, just a final update on the membership drive we were running last month for the podcast's third birthday. You know, the podcast is now officially three years old and it's doing great. We didn't hit our goal of 200 new supporters, but we did really well. You know, we got nearly 160 new supporters

or upgraded supporters last month, which is really just fantastic. And I wanna thank all of you who supported the show over on patreon.com. Of course, if you haven't already, you can always go do that at any time. But since we did do so well, I still plan to do the Elon Musk series

that I was talking about that I had set as a goal. Because you know what? I really want to do it. I know you would really enjoy it. And I know that there'll be some more people who'd come along to the show if we do it and give it a listen. And hey, maybe they'll join up on patreon.com as well. So as the show turns three, just a big thanks to everyone who supports the show, but also everyone who listens to the show and shares it with their friends and leaves us nice reviews on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and does all those things to kind of help the show grow, to help more people find out that it exists so that these critical perspectives on the tech industry can reach even more people. And with that said, this week's guest is Matt Binder. Matt is a reporter at Mashable and the host of Scam, Economy, and Doomed. If you are on Twitter or follow the Twitter news around everything that Elon Musk has been up to with it, you must have heard of Matt Binder by now because he covers it all and follows it all so well. So now that Elon Musk has been in control of Twitter for six months, I figured it

was probably a good opportunity to check in with how that's all been going. And so I thought that Matt would be the perfect guest to come on and to talk to us about that. We talk about what this whole experience has been like, but we also focus on what's been going on in the past few weeks as Elon Musk has kind of finally been moving forward with his plan to take away the blue checks and of course the absolute failure that you know all of his kind of initiatives with this whole paid verification thing have been and we end the show by talking about whether an alternative to Twitter will really potentially cut into its market share and really kind of replace it you know we've seen a number of attempts at that. And we talk about the most recent one as well, which is a platform called

Blue Sky that is supported by Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter. And that has been getting a lot of attention over the past week in particular, as more people from Twitter and from particular communities on Twitter have been moving over to that platform and honestly have been having a pretty good time over there. And I would just say, of course, if you are on Blue Sky, you can follow me over there, and you can also follow the podcast. There are accounts set up for both of us. So if you've made it over there, make sure to look us up.

And so if you like this episode, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And you can join supporters like Michael in Cold Spring, New York, Marissa in Philadelphia, Peter in Cambridge, UK, Lisa from Texas, Chaitanya from the UK, Rebecca Cran, Dax Flame from Southern California, Pete in California, and Raquel from Boston by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and becoming a supporter. Thanks again to everyone who has

supported the show over the past month, and I hope you enjoy this conversation. Matt, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. I knew that we needed to talk about Musk again. We're at about six months, and I figured, who is a good person to have a conversation about this with? Of course, Matt Binder. Very happy to have you on the show. You know, you're always tweeting and writing about all the stuff that's related to Elon Musk and Twitter. I'm sure nerve wracking and frustrating work, but essential at the same time. I appreciate it. I actually, I really enjoy it. The way I go at it, I obviously see the various issues that actually harm vulnerable groups.

But me personally, I'm having the time of my life. You know what? I get that, right? Like, I hate this guy and I feel like my hatred kind of fuels me, right? And I haven't been doing like the play by play of everything going on with the Twitter stuff. Certainly, I've been commenting on Twitter itself and things like that. But back in, you know, the days of like 2017, 18, 19, when Tesla was like, you know, basically a bonfire and was having its production hell and everything was going to shit there. I was doing more of a play by play in that time. And like, I was just

loving seeing how he was like fucking everything up with that company. And so I'm sure it's very similar for you right now with the Twitter stuff. What's incredible, I think, is that unlike his other companies, a lot of people are familiar with what makes a successful social media platform, like people just outside of the business. It's not like you're making electric vehicles or you're shooting rockets up into space. You know, those are very niche industries. And if you actually work in those industries, you don't have many other places to go.

Like Tesla and SpaceX are some of the top, if not the top companies in that specific field. But when it comes to social media and really any sort of business to customer industry, it's a lot different, I think. And he is showing, I think, the world that he is not able to handle it. Like, you know, obviously SpaceX gets most of its money from government contracts, subsidies, just straight up from investors. So he's not dealing with customers yet.

And when he does, when he does end up doing his space vacations or whatever, it's going to be very, very rich people who do it. So it's not like he's going to be advertising on television and trying to make customers happy, like to be millionaires and billionaires. Also with Tesla, I think it's a little bit different because Tesla was making a large chunk of its money, still does, not even from the sale of its cars, but from those carbon credits. And when they do sell vehicles, we're still talking people who can afford to throw down $40,000, $50,000, $60,000, not to mention all the add-ons for features promised for the future. And they really want that product. If you're throwing that

much money down and you're not getting it for months in some of these cases, then you really want that product. But Twitter is this first experience with the types of products and services I think most industries deal with, and that most everyday, normal, average human beings are used to buying, selling, consuming. And it's pretty clear that he is completely in over his head when it comes to that. I think another big thing with Twitter as well is like, he was in the really early days of Tesla and he was one of the co-founders or whatever of SpaceX, right? And so, you know, these companies are getting started and he's there right from the beginning of them. And as you say, there's particular markets that they're focusing on, but something like Twitter, you know, this is

a company that's been around for what, over a decade or something. And he enters at this specific period in its history, people already have this like long relationship with this company, this expectation of what it's going to be like to use Twitter, to use this service. And he enters and it feels like he doesn't really understand what is going on here. Like he has a preconceived notion of what Twitter is and how it should work based on how he uses the platform. But he has no interest in really understanding how other people use the platform and what their experience might be and what they expect. Right. I mean, I think a great example of exactly what you just mentioned is

the whole thing with the verification blue checkmarks. He came in and he decided that he did not want to continue running the old verification system where Twitter would actually reach out to notable users, celebrities, pro athletes, musicians, media figures, and verify ones that they felt had a very good likelihood of being impersonated on the platform. He didn't want to do that anymore. And he decided that one way to make money for Twitter to drive revenue would be to actually charge for that. And we can get into why that's a bad idea, but to stick with your point about how he just came in and was like, it's my way or the highway. Just think about how he marketed his product. Let's just put aside what we think about it. Just think about how he decided to market the product. Instead of going out there and saying, oh, hey, here's Twitter Blue for $8 a

month. You get to edit your tweets. Everyone wants to do that. The feature people have been requesting forever and now it's here, even though we all know that it was actually here before Musk. But let's just follow his usual hype man bravado. He can bring that up, the long tweets, the longer videos. But instead of hyping up the features, the benefits of Twitter Blue, it is marketed as a way to antagonize the old blue checkmarked users. He's literally in their, like Stephen King's tweet threads going,

hey, you're going to pay me $8. LOL, pay the $8. You could talk all the shit you want about me, but you're still going to pay me $8. Like, listen, if you're just out there to troll, that's great. If you're out there to make money though, it's the most ridiculous business plan I've ever heard in my life to antagonize the users that you want to pay you with the product you want them to pay for. It makes no sense. No, you're completely right. Right. It's like, you know, some people like Elon Musk, some people don't, right? But the whole idea is like, if you are buying into this product, you are like personally

giving me money is how he's positioning this, right? Even at the same time, as he's pissing off like a whole load of people because of one, how he's managing the platform, how he's treating it. But then, you know, on top of that, because he has really sort of carved out a particular political niche for himself in the past year or so, where he's become much more open about his politics, you know, about embracing anti-trans people, about embracing right-wing conspiracy theories, about, you know, embracing the woke mind virus and wanting to go after that. And it's like, okay, so if I'm paying $8 and you're suggesting that it's basically like

supporting you, if I'm paying $8, then why the hell would I do that? Right. Along with it being marketed as a F you to the people he wanted to pay exactly what you just said. It was also set up as, and by buying it, you are announcing your support for me, Elon Musk, and my vision for Twitter. And a lot of people don't agree with that vision for all the reasons you just mentioned about his personal politics, but also actual Twitter policy in terms of, yeah, you know what? A lot of people

don't want all those accounts you are reactivating to come back. A lot of people don't want you to remove policies protecting marginalized groups. But here you are saying, pay dollars and that's your support, your thumbs up for this vision. It just doesn't make any sense. That's even without getting into other obvious things, such as I've been comparing Twitter Blue to another premium service from another social media platform. Just a few months before Elon launched Twitter Blue, Snapchat launched their premium service where you get extra features like special stickers and things that other people don't have for $4 a month. Now we are six months into both

Snapchat and Twitter Blue. Six months into this, Twitter Blue has around 630,000 to 650,000 paying subscribers. And that includes all the people he gave it to for free, which we'll get to, and all the people who paid long ago, unsubscribed, but can't get rid of their checkmark. And we could also get into that later as well. So they have around 650,000 paying subscribers. And Snapchat's premium service has 3 million paying subscribers. And the reason for that is, aside from Snapchat obviously marketing it better, is that Snapchat's features appeal to the user base better than Twitter's features. And if you want to go a step further, think about YouTube Premium, which is YouTube's premium service, which has, I think,

tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of paying subscribers. What they did is even smarter. The benefits aren't for the content creator, which is a very small portion of their user base. It is for the content consumer, which is like 99% of their user base. It, you know, you pay for YouTube premium, no ads on videos. What more could you ask for? That's perfect if you're a regular YouTube viewer.

Twitter Blue, there is no benefit for people who just use Twitter to log in, follow their favorite celebrities, check out sports scores, see breaking news. They have no interest in posting ever, which is a lot of people. There's no benefit for them. They don't care about a check mark. They don't care about posting long tweets and videos.

They don't do that. They don't even post short tweets and short videos. You're basically creating a product that only benefits the smallest user base you have. Each level of Twitter blue makes even less sense than the previous level. It's just a bad business decision from him to bet the house on Twitter blue. Yeah, it shows the real incompetence behind it, right? Not only for Elon Musk himself, but for his kind of coterie of advisors that he brought in with him who were supposed to kind of revolutionize and upend Twitter and kind

of make this new platform. But I want to reverse just for a second there to go back to, you know, this initial kind of hatred or dislike of the blue checkmark that Elon Musk has. And I don't know if you feel this way, but I feel like at its core, this really comes down to Elon Musk's hatred for journalists and the fact that they were given blue checkmarks and he wanted to find some way to make it so that they did not get that any longer. And certainly he turned it into this power to the people thing where he was re-leveling power, anyone could get it. But I feel like for me, it's not that he was really concerned that celebrities and sports players and stuff like that had check marks.

It was because journalists have been given it and he wanted to ensure they didn't have it any longer. I wonder what you think about that. And if you think that that was also kind of a motivation for him. I think that's spot on. And I think even further than that, in terms of what you were saying, I don't think he even thought about celebrities like Hollywood actors and worldwide music superstars and literally the users that made Twitter what it was in the early days, who over the years have actually left the platform because of the various issues with them being able to deal with some of the worst people on it. I think an important thing to say first, before we get into this specific thing, is to actually set up Twitter's place in the industry. Because Twitter is not a big tech platform, even though it's often put in those upper echelons of the tech space. It's not anywhere near as big as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta. It's nowhere near as big user-wise as the biggest social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook. It is pretty tiny compared to them. Those companies have like 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 800, 900, 1 million, 2 billion, 2 billion users.

Twitter's just hitting like 250 million, according to Musk. Of that, a lot of them don't even log into the platform on a regular basis. So it's very small. But what puts Twitter among those groups when we talk about it is the particular makeup of its user base. Very early on, and funny enough, because of the verification system they set up in 2009, Twitter attracted huge celebrities. I mean, I don't know if you remember, but in some of the earliest days of Twitter, it was all like, what were the Justin Bieber fans called again? I don't remember. The Beliebers? Beliebers, right. Literally, they had to put his tweets on their own server because they were

getting so much interactions and stuff. And the reason celebrities flocked there was because in 2009, Twitter rolled out this verification system for celebrities because they were facing a lawsuit from a former major league baseball player who was upset that there was an account parodying him or impersonating him on the platform. So they set up this verification system just basically to make sure that celebrities' fans weren't getting scammed and falling for fake accounts. It was no more than that. And because of that, celebrities came here. I still see the tweets in my head of celebrities constantly having to say, no, facebook.com slash da-da-da-da-da is not me.

My only platform is Twitter. This is the only place you can find me. No, youtube.com slash blah-blah-blah, I'm not posting videos there. Twitter is where I am. That's it. You can't talk to me anywhere else. Because Twitter was the only place that got involved in saying, hey, this person on this platform, that's actually them. There's nobody else that can claim that on this platform. And they liked that. And that's what made them use Twitter. And they brought their fans on here because what better way to attract a user base than letting your biggest users bring everybody here? I mean, easy peasy for them. So that was a huge driver for Twitter. Back to Musk now with the verification badges. I don't think he thought of these people because he clearly acquired Twitter from the standpoint of this right-wing bubble he's in. to back out and Twitter sued him, we actually, as part of that lawsuit, we got to see some of his

private text messages that had to be released as part of the lawsuit. He had to submit texts that he had regarding the Twitter sale. And among those text messages were numerous texts quite clearly stating the sort of really right-wing driven reasons he bought the website. One example that pops to my mind is I think the earliest text he received flat out asking him to buy Twitter was from his ex-wife Tallulah Riley, who I think her claim to fame is other than I think being a rich socialite, she was an actress in Westworld and HBO. She texted him asking him to do something and flat out threw out like, hey, maybe we

just buy it, asking Musk to do something about the Babylon Bee being suspended from Twitter. Literally, the Babylon Bee, at least according to these text messages, was one of the reasons why this sort of interest in buying Twitter was even sparked. It's incredible to think of that, but this is the laser vision he has for Twitter all the way from why he bought it to his vision for the platform. He's not thinking of anything outside of this political right-wing bubble he's in. And to be clear, Babylon Bee is like a right-wing version of The Onion that is not actually funny. That's fascinating.

I didn't go through the text messages very much. I do remember Jason Calacanis tweeting or texting him very clearly that this was an opportunity to gut the workforce and fire a bunch of people. And like, all of that is in there too, right? Oh, he went even more than that. He was like, what can I do to be CEO? I will fall on my sword for you, my liege. It was like really like rich dudes

literally groveling to richer dudes. It was amazing to see. Yeah, it was like a bunch of evidence of the degree of like sucking up that happens toward Elon Musk because he's such a wealthy and influential guy. And there's so many other rich people who just want to be close to him, who just want him to say like, yes, you're doing a good job. You can work with me. You can be close to me. It's really pathetic, basically. And so obviously, as we've been discussing,

Elon Musk turns checkmarks into this paid service. People know by now that it initially launches, it's a complete shit show. And then, you know, it relaunches again later. And he has basically some people who are paying eight bucks a month in order to get a checkmark and other people who still had the checkmark from before, and they're still allowed to keep it for a while. And then finally, he announces that that is going to change on April 1. And that is delayed until April 20. But it's finally removed. So then finally he announces that that is going to change on April 1st and that is delayed until April 20th, but it's finally removed. So what is kind of sparking him to finally remove it at this moment? And kind of what is his goal? At least initially he was planning to take the check marks away. They've come back for some people, as I'm sure you can

tell us about, but like, what is the actual goal with this service? Is there any way to say it's working out to any degree that he imagined or believed it would? Right. So when Elon Musk bought Twitter, he was buying a company that 90% of their revenue is generated via advertisements. I believe the last public record revenue number is announced by Twitter is from 2021. And they generated $5 billion in revenue that year. And of that $5 billion, $4.5 billion came from advertisers.

The other $500 million came from API fees and partnerships like that. So we're talking about a company that their bread and butter is ad sales. And Musk buys Twitter. And because of who he is and what he's planning to do with it, advertisers totally make sense, right? They get scared. They have their own brand to protect. They get cold feet or they flat out don't want to think about the car companies who are making electric vehicles. Why would they fund one of their competitors? They're just like, okay, we're not advertising on Twitter anymore. So half of Twitter's biggest advertisers just up and leave shortly after Elon Musk acquires Twitter. They've not come back.

There's been a recent reporting with sources from the digital ad agencies that actually help these brands facilitate these ad buys that those advertisers are not coming back. The few that did come back or the ones that never left are spending 80% less than they did with Musk than they did previously, I should say. They've cut back their advertising dollars on Twitter 80% with Musk at the helm. So even among the people like Apple and Disney who didn't just outright jump ship, they're not spending as much. So he's trying to figure out how he's going to make money. And for him, he just, I guess, thought that subscriptions make sense. And I can tell you, unless you're running like a really niche service, subscriptions don't make sense. You'll never make enough with subscriptions as you could with advertising dollars.

Just look at, for example, Netflix, probably the most successful subscription business on the planet. And they've even hit the ceiling and they're trying to figure out what to do. And they go, you know what, we finally got to start selling ads and we'll launch a cheaper plan that does have ads. Because they know that ads is where it's at. You know, even look at the cable industry. Live entertainment, sports, live shows like the WWE, World Wrestling Entertainment. They get tons of money offered to them for the fees for specific networks to carry them because everyone's watching streaming services now.

So for cable, live TV is like the big money maker because they can sell ads on those and people can't DVR it and fast forward. They got to watch it live, right? It's live sports. Can't get it spoiled. So ads are super important, especially if you're looking into making tons and tons of money. Small indie publication, yeah, don't deal with advertisers.

Just sell subscriptions. Big company, you got to sell ads. And so to hope that you will make up $4.5 billion via subscriptions is just a losing strategy to begin with, especially when you paid $44 billion for the website. And so I think that was really honestly his hope with Twitter Blue. And you can tell that he's really doubling down and not giving up on that because after it's become pretty clear that Twitter Blue will never be what he hopes it to be. He's doubled down with this other Twitter feature that existed previously, but he's since rebranded and now he's focused his efforts on it. And that's this service called Subscriptions,

which used to be called Super Follows. And it basically allows Twitter users to subscribe to exclusive content from specific Twitter creators. You could get paywalled tweets, private Twitter spaces, which is their audio chat feature. And you basically just subscribe to individual users. Now, previously under the old Twitter, it was called super follows. And the reason you might not have heard of it so much is because it just didn't take off. It just didn't do any good. Twitter was never able to really make it catch on. Now you can argue they didn't really focus on it as much, but it is what it is. Under Musto, it's very clear that he's focusing on it now because he is using it himself and also subscribing

to other users who are using it, like who've turned on subscriptions on their own account for their fans to subscribe to. And he's doing that because, A, it appears in people's feeds, so it promotes the service. And I really think that's the main reason he's subscribing to other users. But for himself, it's also that reason. I'm sure because he actually tweeted out a screenshot and I'm assuming he did it purposefully. He claimed it was just to show direct users where to apply for the subscription feature on your account.

But in that screenshot, it showed how many paying subscribers he had. And it showed that he had around 24,700. Now it's somewhere between 24,700 and 24,799 because Twitter just shows like 24.7K. And he charges $4 a month for it. So basically he's making something like $95,000, $96,000, $97,000 a month from this. For you or me, that's like, holy shit, life-changing money. We'd be set forever. I mean, that'd be it. I'd just focus on making those exclusive tweets for as long as those people stayed subscribed. But for him, we're talking like $1.2 million a year. I think chump change is playing it up for him. I mean, that's nothing. Again,

he's just doing it to promote the service. And you could assume that if Elon Musk only has less than 25,000 paying subscribers, he's the anomaly too. It's not like anyone has more than him. He's the most followed user on Twitter. And he's only been able to get, I believe, 0.018% of his followers to subscribe, to become paying subscribers. I mean, you could also probably assume that the Venn diagram of those 25,000 people who subscribe directly to him and the people who subscribe for Twitter Blue is a perfect circle. You got to believe they're all also subscribed to Twitter Blue. Oh, absolutely. Right. Who else could even pull in numbers even close to what he is, Mr. Beast? I mean,

literally, Twitter's just not the platform for that type of stuff. I wouldn't start a membership service on Twitter. It's just not built for that, in my opinion. I mean, I know they're trying to build out that feature more, but I just can't see it taking off, honestly. And this is not even like a political stance. This is straight up from like a product standpoint. It's just not what people have come to see Twitter as over the, what, 13, 14 years it's now been in existence. Yeah. Subscriptions or super follows or whatever you want to call them, it's just not what Twitter as a platform is made for, right? If you want to do something like that, you go to like Patreon or, you know, one of those platforms that is actually set up that is kind of dedicated. Substack, which Elon loves.

Yeah, of course. Substack as well. Yeah, yeah. I'm familiar with those platforms. But you know, Twitter is not like the platform for that. But Elon Musk very much wants it to be because he doesn't, I think, really have a clear idea of what Twitter is. And he's trying to figure out something that actually works, something that might make some money, but also work out. And you can see how, you know, as you were saying, the ad revenue has completely plummeted and these subscriptions are not going to make up the difference, right? It's not going to get them back up to a break even or something like that. As much as he says that Twitter is definitely close to doing that by the end of the quarter or whatever, I think we can see that we're not actually believing the figures that he's putting out there. And of course, Elon Musk is known as someone who is

not very much a reliable figure when it comes to telling the truth, especially in business matters. I know when I'm doing financially well, the first thing I do is not pay my rent. That's yeah. And let myself get sued. And, you know, if my employees in Singapore get kicked out of the office because I haven't paid the rent, that's exactly what everyone does when they're doing really well. I wonder, you know, obviously you say the people who are subscribing to Elon Musk personally, like, who the fuck are these people? Do you have any kind of insight into the type of people who are subscribing to Twitter Blue and subscribing to Elon Musk personally? What should we be expecting there? What are the people

that he's actually attracting to pay for this service that is clearly uninteresting to most people using the platform? Now, we don't have too much on the people who are directly subscribing to Elon Musk's private, exclusive, paywalled content. Perhaps that'll come out in the coming months. But what we do have, thanks to this great independent researcher, Travis Brown, who's been tracking Twitter blue subscriber data since earlier this year via Twitter's very own API. So the numbers are legit. The only caveat is just how much he's able to pull from users who just might not be tweeting that much. So their stuff isn't appearing, which he's able to thankfully due to leaks that have come out. It's been a while actually,

since we got any Twitter blue subscriber official leaked numbers from Twitter. But because of the ones we did have, he's able to estimate exactly just how much he's missing because his numbers during that period were very close to the actual official leaked numbers. So Travis Brown's been tracking these and I've been in touch with him and I've been doing a number of pieces based on his data. And there's a number of really interesting different points to take out of this data. For one, half of Twitter blue subscribers, half of the people who pay $8 a month to Elon Musk, it comes with all those features. But I think we've got a pretty good idea that for most users, most Twitter blue subscribers, the main killer features are one, the blue check mark, and two, the priority they receive in the algorithm where their tweets get extra boosts, I guess you could say, into the default for you feed and in the replies to tweets, if you check any tweet now, the first replies are always people with the blue checkmark with honestly the most dumbest shit opinions any human being could possibly have.

It's amazing. It's like the worst content you've ever seen. Really improving the user experience. A website I definitely want to pay for. Right. And again, I'm not even talking politically. I would prefer my For You feed just be filled with the hilarious garbage that comes out of Jordan Peterson and Charlie Kirk's mouth than the absolute bottom feeding crap I see now from the dumbest people alive. I would prefer the right wing stuff filling my feed because at least

it's relevant to my interests. I'd be able to dunk on it. It's right there. I don't got to go searching for stuff, but it's not even that. Remember the old bum fight videos from the 90s? It's garbage like that, just filling up your feed, crappy viral videos, crypto hype, AI threads about how AI is the future. And it shows a video of an AI that's almost, you could unmistakably confuse it for a human. And then you actually watch the video and it's the most robotic shit you've ever seen in your life. You got to get your AI hub bro advice as well, you know? Right, right. So it's not even just like I'm against Musk politically. No, it's more so that he's turning the platform into garbage. So back to the Twitter blue data,

half of Twitter blue subscribers have less than 1000 followers. 20% of them have less than 100 followers and something like 3,000 of them have like, I think, zero followers. So what does that mean? Now, of course, there are probably really great, funny or accounts out there that create great content that just have not got discovered and haven't blown up, sure, sure, sure. They're probably not the ones subscribed to Twitter Blue based on the content we see from Twitter Blue subscribers. But I just want to put that out there so you know I'm not dunking on people for follower number count. But the fact is that what we're seeing is that the people buying this stuff, buying Twitter Blue, I should say, are people who just have not been able to organically build a following because they just suck at creating

content for Twitter. And they truly believe that the thing that's been holding them back, in their view, like they don't know they suck, obviously. In their view, the thing that has been holding them back this whole time is that they did not have the blue check and that it was the blue check that made these users big. They have it completely backwards. And it's kind of hilarious that they see someone like Beyonce and they don't think to themselves, oh, Beyonce got the blue check because she's a huge global phenomenon, huge superstar. No, they think that, oh, Beyonce is as big as she is on this platform because she has the blue check. It's just like the most backwards thinking you can imagine, but it's clear that that's what they believe. You don't even have to even just guess that.

You just look anytime Elon tweets about Twitter blue offering this algorithm boost, the replies to his tweet, I should say, just fill with people complaining, Elon, Elon, I'm paying for Twitter blue and my tweets still just get one like, yeah, man, because your content sucks. Like, daddy can't help you with this one. It's not even like just the accounts with like hardly any followers though, right? Like even like some of the bigger right wing accounts are constantly complaining about how the algorithm is still suppressing them. And like, they're not getting the views even though they're paying for blue and they are being enhanced or whatever the word is by the algorithm because they're

paying and because there's some of the accounts that Elon likes. But you can never even please them, let alone the people who have no followers and no views. Right, right. The algorithm is going to do what it does. If it's like a breaking news thing or something that you know is going to really hit with your audience and then get retweeted, you could tell then. But in terms of the majority of the random tweets we regularly post, you never have any idea which is going to take off. I've had tweets that I just throw out there and all of a sudden it's got thousands and thousands of retweets and likes.

And it's like, oh. And then there's other times where I post something and you can just see that the algorithm didn't grab it. It didn't get through the feed because it just got not much interaction. It just is what it is. You just try again next time. But these guys obsess over these numbers. I mean, I just don't care. That's not how I judge things by when I have a

hit tweet, do I notice it? Sure. But it's that type of tweet that I pay attention to. If one doesn't take off, it's just like, oh, on to the next. But these guys obsess over the tweets that don't do good and they get angry about it and they complain to the manager about it. It's just very bizarre behavior. It shows the niche community that is like really interested in this too, right? If you've kind of upended the whole kind of verification system around the idea that like it was these kind of elites that were getting access to blue checks and we need to kind of make it so it's accessible to everybody and everyone has the opportunity to like get

this growth and this kind of status that these people have before. And then they pay into it. And that's not actually what happens because that's not how it worked in the first place. Like it shows how the whole kind of idea is completely backwards from the beginning. Right. And I want to take us back to April 20th, you know, not that long ago. This is the date when Elon Musk finally took the kind of legacy blue check marks away. Do you want to give us some insight into what happened there, both with the taking away, the giving back, the whole campaign to start blocking blue checks? Like, what is going on here?

And how is Elon Musk, in particular, responding to all these things? Because nothing is clearly working out as he expects. Right. Now we're getting to the really funny stuff. Yeah. So, you know, April 1st, he said it was going to happen. The removal of the blue checks. It didn't. April 20th comes around, which was shortly after April 1st. He said it would be April 20th. And lo and behold, he did something shocking. And that's actually deliver on a promise. For him, that's a rarity. So, you know, take it when it comes. He did delay it like plenty of times, though, which is kind of his MO.

Yeah. But this one delivered, which you can't say for full self-driving cars or our landing on Mars. And so April 20th rolled around, the legacy verified blue check marks are taken away on all the accounts, but three. Now remember, at this point, it's supposed to be just people paying for Twitter Blue with these blue check marks. But people noticed that three accounts that were clearly not paying for Twitter Blue because of their previous public statements saying they weren't going to pay for it. These three people were William Shatner, Stephen King, and LeBron James. Now, William Shatner, we could put aside right now because it's clear via these tweets that Shatner and Musk exchanged

that it seemed like Musk contacted him privately before April 20th and offered to give him Twitter Blue for free because William Shatner just tweeted out a vague thank you to Musk. And Musk was like, you'll always be my captain. And clearly very happy to be checkmarked for free. Jeff Bezos brought him to space. Elon's given him checkmarks. He's loving this. They're all obsessed with him.

And not to go off topic here, too, but the whole William Shatner going to space thing is wonderful because I know he probably doesn't have the best politics, but when he went to space, the experience he shared was fantastic. And it really was a slap in the face to both Musk and Bezos and what they want their space adventures to be. Because again, I don't want to go off topic, but I feel like I have to mention this because I love this story so much. Shatner comes back down to Earth after traveling to space with Jeff Bezos. He gets interviewed and he's asked what he experienced. Everyone was expecting him to be like, oh, Captain's Log, journey into space. It was fantastic. The adventure awaits us. I loved it. It was amazing. But no, he was like, I had a life-changing experience. He was like, I looked out and I just saw nothing. It was just a vast nothingness. And then I looked down at earth and it was so beautiful. And it made me think we have everything we could ever need right there. Why are we destroying it? And I got so depressed and I just felt this sad darkness overwhelm me." Then Bezos interrupts him with popping a cork of some champagne and completely destroys the

moment. But this should be the takeaway that we should all take from this. But of course, that wouldn't be the best advertisement for space vacations with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, right? It's no wonder Bezos wanted to shut him up, right? Right, right. So Shatner gets his checkmark for free, maybe a bonus after his experience in space. But LeBron and Stephen King were adamant, like, we don't want this. This is stupid. We don't even want you to give it to us. In fact, we know LeBron didn't say that because according to reports, I forgot who, I think The Verge reported this one. Alex Heath, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Musk, I guess much like he contacted Shatner or Shatner's people, Musk contacted LeBron before April 20th and was like, hey, I want to pay for your checkmark. I want to offer it to you for free. And LeBron was like, straight up, no thanks. I don't want it.

And Musk gave it to him anyway. And I don't know if Musk tried the same with Stephen King, but based on Stephen King's reaction when he did get it, he was like, why do I still have the blue check? I don't want it. I didn't pay for it. Don't give it to me. So Musk admitted that he was paying for those three people. And when he says paying, we really should say upfront, he's not paying for anything. He's just telling his Twitter employees, hey, put that check mark on these accounts. It's not like he's giving $8 out of his wallet. Even though they show up, it still says if you click on them that they are paying, right? Right, right. Which is an issue that I'm sure we'll get to.

I will say, though, that Stephen King one is especially funny because early on in November, when Musk first brought up the idea of paying for the check mark and Stephen King came out and said it was dumb and Musk was like, well, what's wrong with paying $20? And they went back and forth and haggled down to Musk jumping in and going like, oh, what about $8? Would you pay $8? Yeah. That's where the $8 comes from is those tweets. Right. That's where the $8 comes from. is those tweets. Right, that's where the $8 comes from, right. But apparently, Musk is the ultimate deal negotiator, and Stephen King was able to negotiate Musk down to negative $8. So those three accounts have it on April 20th.

And then the next day is Friday, April 21st, and I have this piece ready to go. Now I had planned it because I knew that this would be a piece to publish right after the blue check mark thing. I had known that this was going to be a thing, people blocking everyone with a blue check after the legacy verified checks were taken away. So there could be no mistake over who was paying for Twitter Blue because it started to go around in November. Now in November, people started talking about blocking these users. I don't know who started the hashtag. Maybe it was Drill, but certainly the largest account that tweeted it, hashtag block the blue, was Twitter legend Drill, who is this huge Twitter account, probably, in my opinion, the biggest self-contained, self-made Twitter user. Drill has over 1.7 million followers. And yeah,

there's been various people who've come to Twitter and have created careers off of their tweets, off of Twitter, like Rob Delaney is a great example, but Drill never took that step off of Twitter. Yeah, he had that Adult Swim show, but he was still playing his Twitter character in the Adult Swim show. This guy became the biggest Twitter user just from his tweets. He tweeted Block the Blue first and it went really big in November. I was like, I know this is going to be big after this happens. I reached out to him. I sent him a bunch of questions. He got back to singer and I featured a bunch of other users. And the piece went up that Friday, April 21st, and it immediately went viral. It had like tens of thousands of likes and retweets, you know, short, just a short amount

of time. Later that night and into the next morning, Saturday morning now, hashtag block the blue is trending on Twitter. When you click it, the feed is being refreshed with dozens of new tweets every couple of minutes. It was clearly becoming a thing. And I knew it was starting to get noticed over at Twitter HQ when I saw that Elon Musk himself was starting to like tweets that mentioned hashtag block the blue. One tweet was from the old school tech evangelist, Robert Scoble. People might remember him. His claim to fame in the very early days of Twitter was being the guy who single-handedly killed Google Glass

when he took that selfie of him wearing it while he was completely nude in the shower. I unfortunately do remember that. And we had an episode on Google Glass a few months ago. Yeah. Right. The other really great tweet that he liked that mentioned, and I should say, Robert Scoble actually in the tweet Elon Musk liked from Scoble, Scoble had actually included a screenshot of my article with my byline in it. I enjoyed knowing that Musk definitely saw that. He didn't just see hashtag block the blue. He definitely was aware of my article. And we know he's already aware of you from Twitter spaces in the past and things like that.

Yeah. I guess I should mention that he already knew me because in December of last year, I was one of the seven journalists specifically targeted after we reported on the Elon jet tracker that got suspended from the platform. And then I was also the person seemingly personally responsible for Twitter spaces going down for an entire day. Because when I was suspended, I discovered a loophole that still allowed me to not only enter the Twitter spaces audio chats, but also take part in them. And so after they found that out, they booted me out of it and shut down Twitter spaces. So yeah, he probably was before that. I had actual legitimate confirmation with that like on the tweet.

But my favorite was the Tim Sweeney tweet. And for people who don't know who Tim Sweeney is, please keep this in mind when I read this tweet to you, because you need to keep this in mind when you hear what he had to say. Tim Sweeney is the founder and CEO of Epic Games, one of the biggest video game companies on the planet. This guy must be a billionaire himself. They're the company behind Fortnite. So here's Tim Sweeney's tweet that Musk liked. People in this hashtag block the blue pressure campaign are losers and goons. They're the cool kids from junior high who work to exclude we nerds from cool kid events. So just really remember that here's Elon Musk liking the tweet that, you know, ostensibly is for him, but it's still a tweet that outright says,

the people who pay for Twitter blue are the losers and nerds from junior high. And the people who are blocking them are the cool kids from junior high who attended all the cool hip parties. I mean, this guy is the master marketer of Twitter Blue, right? Buy Twitter Blue so you could be stuffed into a locker, right? Oh, man. Like when I saw that tweet, I was like, this indicates so much about this guy, but also like, how can these tech people

who are so fucking rich, they can do whatever the hell they want, but they're still like obsessing over like their little high school squabbles and the fact that they weren't cool kids and all this kind of stuff. Not even high school. Sorry, junior high.. Not even high school. Sorry. Junior high.

Yeah. Even more pathetic. Oh, man. This is a complete side note, but I've always been absolutely enamored by people who can't get over, whether it's junior high, high school, even college. Adults who obsess over their experience in college and high school. Very bizarre behavior to begin with. But for a super successful rich guy to obsess over it, it's just really. It really tells you a lot about where their mindset is.

You can't buy what they want, right? I mean, that's Elon Musk in a nutshell. He wants to be liked. He wants to be funny. He wants to be a poster. And he just doesn't have it he just billions of dollars and he you can't buy that you just can't yeah no it's it's a really good point and i think it's essential to kind of understand the psyche of musk right and so just to return to

that whole kind of uh fair for a second you know basically what happens is block the blue takes off you know elon musk personally gets very offended by this. So he puts the blue checks back onto all these accounts with over a million. Well, hold on. And you, of course. Well, he first put it on just Drill and myself because it was very clear. I saw it happen in real time. I was at my kid's first soccer game of the season, my seven-year-old.

And my phone starts going crazy. And I go on there. And everyone's screenshotting just me and Drill's account. Musk had tweeted maybe a few hours earlier, checkmate. Two separate words, checkmate. And people were trying to figure out what he meant by that. I had a feeling he was going to address it somehow. Someone said to me, do you think he's going to put the check mark on you guys? They said that before he did it. And I was like,

I don't think so, because that would actually be very funny. And that's not Musk. And then he did it. And I actually had to reply, I stand corrected. Elon Musk has done his very first funny thing. I had to hand it to him. It was very funny that he did it to Drill and I. He had a great back and forth moment with Drill because Drill decided, because if you subscribe to Twitter Blue, even if you pay, if you change your username, or maybe just your username, your profile name, like the name on your account, not the ad handle, just like the text name above your ad handle, or you change your profile picture, they temporarily remove the blue checkmark until they can manually review it. So you can't buy a blue checkmark, get it, and then change your account to make it look like somebody else who can impersonate them. So Drill, using that method, he was consistently changing his profile name to remove the blue check mark, and Twitter was consistently putting it back on him back and forth. And then eventually, I guess, whoever had the honor of being the guy or girl who had to sit at Twitter HQ doing that all day, eventually they had to go home for the day, I guess. And Drill's account is currently stuck in limbo. His profile is completely locked. He can't change his profile details because he doesn't currently have the blue check, but he's technically

subscribed to Twitter Blue, so he can't change anything until they manually review it. I should say at first they just put the blue check on our account. It said I was not subscribed to Twitter Blue. It was just the visual, the blue check. But then the next day they actually officially subscribed me to Twitter blue. So I actually have access to all the like Twitter blue special features that people pay for. Like I can make the long tweets. I can upload the long videos. You can use the bold and the italic text. So back to Saturday now, though. So after he puts it on Meandro, all of a sudden, maybe like 20, 30 minutes later, then I noticed like Hasan Piker gets the blue check. And then little by little, it becomes clear that almost every user with over a million followers has gotten a blue checkmark. I say almost because it appears like there were specific

people singled out not to get one, like former Twitter CEO and founder, Jack Dorsey, which is very funny. He did not get a blue checkmark, even though he has close to 5 million followers. They did not make carve-outs for deceased celebrities like Norm McDonald, Anthony Bourdain. Or journalists. Oh yeah, like Jamal Khashoggi from Washington Post. So their accounts even appeared with the blue checkmark. I really want to point this out too. A lot of people in their coverage have been saying like, oh, these celebrities got their blue check marks back. That's not correct. They didn't get the blue check marks back because the ones on their account now do not have the same tag that the ones they previously had do. Now before, back when they were both check marks under the old system and under

Twitter blue, if you clicked on someone who got verified under the old system, it says this user is legacy verified because they may or may not be notable. If you were subscribed to Twitter Blue, you would say simply say, this user has subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number with Twitter. Now, these celebrities have done neither. They've not paid for Twitter Blue. They've not verified their phone number. And there have been a number of pieces speaking to different sort of legal experts saying that some of these celebrities, if they wanted to pursue this, could possibly have a case. Because by doing that for them, it makes it look like they are advocating for this product or service. Even just by the fact that they would be a user of it,

proudly sporting this Twitter blue badge on their account, their fans or followers may see this and go, oh, so-and-so is using this service. I'm going to buy it too. When they don't want to endorse this service, I mean, some of them have made it quite clear that they do not want to endorse this service and they have it. Now, I know I've been approached by a few people asking if I had any intention of pursuing it. I'm probably one of, if not the smallest account that got it. I just have like 140,000 followers. My damages are nil. If anything, I probably am the one user who benefits from this whole ordeal. So I would much prefer seeing a big celebrity who actually would have an argument that they've been greatly damaged by

this pursue this because it's not my place for it. So, you know, I look forward to covering that if that happens. But yeah, I mean, it was just a crazy series of events that happened this past weekend. Can you imagine like a class action lawsuit of like a bunch of celebrities and like major sports players like going after Twitter because Elon Musk stuck check marks on them and said that they were subscribing and had registered their phone number with the company when it's all a load of bullshit. Right. I mean, you got to believe someone's going to pursue it. I haven't heard anything, so I'm not saying I have some sort of insider information. This is just from, I mean, people pursue all sorts, especially if it's a class action lawsuit

or something like that, people pursue all sorts of things. There's going to be somebody who thinks of doing it. Absolutely. As we start to wind this down, we've talked about a bunch of the issues that Twitter has had over the past six months, and in particular, focused on Elon Musk's obsession with the blue check marks and with transforming the service so that he could take blue check marks away from the people he didn't want to have them essentially. But as all of those problems have been happening, we've seen a number of alternatives to Twitter, potential alternatives kind of present themselves as the ones that a bunch of people are going to join. Obviously, Mastodon was one of the early ones

that, you know, after Musk took over, there was a big kind of exodus to Mastodon. But it doesn't seem to like it kind of took the place of Twitter, right? There were some people who moved over there, some people who liked it, who found a new community. But it didn't really take away from Twitter. You know, most people were still on there. Post, of course, is another one that promised to be more for journalists and things like that. That doesn't really seem to have gotten much traction. Substack Notes, most recently, already seems to be running into trouble with the fact

you can't follow people, you can only subscribe to their newsletters. And the CEO there has come under fire for some stuff he said around content moderation that people are not super happy with. The latest one, of course, is Blue Sky, or as some users are calling Blue Ski, which is also kind of founded or funded or whatever by Jack Dorsey, who, you know, is also responsible for Twitter. This is the most recent one. It still claims to have this kind of decentralized ethos like Amassed on. But in the past couple of days, we've seen a lot of kind of major Twitter users move over to this one and suggest that maybe this is the one that finally kind of dethrones Twitter or takes away a lot of its kind of active user base that a lot of people are there for.

What do you think about the suggestion that because Elon Musk has imperiled Twitter so much, has kind of destroyed the experience of what it used to be, that there might be a platform that can really take it over? And do you think that Blue Sky is potentially the one that might do it? I think it's going to be very hard to replace Twitter. And that's, you know, And do you think that Blue Sky is potentially the one that might do it? Those are platforms based on multimedia sharing. You got to create videos. You got to take photos. The amount of time it takes just to get a post up due to that reason of, you know, it takes a little bit more to post on those sites. Twitter is a platform that very easy to just see something, read something and want to get an opinion out there. You could do it in seconds, just throw out text. And unlike Facebook, it's not walled in. Everything is publicly available unless you specifically private your individual account. But other than

that, everything is open to anyone to find. And so I do think it'll be hard to actually replace Twitter. A lot of people use it and it's especially popular within the news media space, which makes it very friendly to journalists and media figures and political discussion. So Musk would need to continue to really mess with the platform. I mean, honestly, if he just continues with the Twitter blue stuff, shoving all those accounts in people's feeds, I do think it'll eventually happen. People can only take so much of their logging in and seeing it being unusable for them before they just give up on it. It's probably important to say as well, and we didn't really talk about this, but Elon Musk has also specifically been going for news publications and news accounts, labeling

public broadcasters recently, and some of them have left the platform as a result. And because of putting price tags on API usage and things like that, and because of the Twitter blue stuff as well, some kind of weather services and public alerts and things like that are, you know, leaving Twitter and not doing those things anymore. So it seems like those actions could potentially take away some of that beneficial nature of like, you know, this is where you go to get news and information. Yeah, so that seems to be a potential issue too, if you're thinking about the actual use cases that a lot of people go to Twitter for. Right. The API issue is a whole, we could do a whole episode on the API. Honestly, it's, you got large companies like Microsoft

literally saying, we're not paying for it. We're not doing it. Removing functionality from Xbox to share gameplay videos with Twitter. It's basically Twitter saying, we don't want you to make free content for us. I've never seen anything like it. It's incredible. So it's certainly possible for Musk to kill Twitter, but it's been a long time since we actually lost a major social media platform. Probably the best example, and there's a huge time gap, is MySpace. People have to

understand News Corp, Fox News' parent organization, they didn't just buy MySpace and then it just kaput, died. It took three years of them running it before Facebook just swooped in and took over, and then MySpace was just done. So it wasn't a quick death. Musk could certainly run this for a while unless his backers are like, we don't want to do this anymore. And then he's got to figure out what to do. But if everything stays the course, he could certainly keep it going. But Blue Sky is definitely the first of the alternatives that I've seen actually take off. Now, Mastodon's been around before this whole Twitter drama. When Musk bought Twitter, people tried moving there.

And it definitely certainly has its place. It's a very niche community. It's a lot of programmers and tech evangelists and real hardcore, people who believe in decentralization. That's their mantra. Those people are on there. And that's great. It's a very earnest platform, though.

It's not a place for shit posters, which is a major part of what makes twitter twitter and you know it just didn't have that culture to it that made for a replacement you know good side thing you could use twitter and mastodon but it's not going to fill that hole that not using Twitter would leave. But Blue Sky. Now I was on Blue Sky. I got an invite code like two weeks ago. And when I went on there, it was not quite master done, but it was a lot of people in the Web3 space, which, you know, like you mentioned, I have a show called Scam Economy. You can guess what I think about Web3 people. Also views held by this show very much. Right, right. And it was like good developers, like legit developers who probably create good stuff.

But it was just like more tech talk. And suddenly, like on the night of April 26th, Wednesday night to Thursday, April 27th, all of a sudden I noticed that like some of my favorite people on Twitter, like shit posters, funny accounts, like good journalists who have a sense of humor are all of a sudden getting on blue sky and they just start posting. And it's very clear in a very short amount of time that their posts just became so popular that they took over the feeds of people even outside of this little circle we had to the point where Blue Sky was us, these users in this little shit posting, leftist, funny account community that just came straight from Twitter. in this little shit posting leftist funny account community

that just came straight from Twitter. And it started to grow. Drill ends up joining. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gets an invite code and gets on there. And it's just like, holy shit, this has not happened on any of those other alternatives that you just previously mentioned. And it's actually fun to use.

Other alternatives I've tried, and it's actually fun to use. Other alternatives I've tried and it's like the user interface isn't there. It just feels very poorly coded. In Mastodon's case, all that stuff sort of lines up, but the culture is not there. But Blue Sky is actually solid, very bare bones. But that actually i think made it work because it felt like very early twitter all you could do on blue sky right now is post 300 character posts and steal images you cannot even post gifs you can't post videos if uh i actually one thing i noticed is that i can't find the change password good luck if you forget it yeah i don't know if that exists i i think if you forget it that's the way you could change it you have to actually pretend you forgot your password though for you

to change it you can't just like go into your settings and change it though there's two feeds, just a chronological feed and then a what's hot feed, which looks to be just the most liked and reposted tweets from the whole platform. So if you get like a hit post, which literally just takes a dozen reposts and likes to do, you get a hit post on blue sky. Then all of a sudden there's a feed for the entire platform that prioritizes your post. And it's just like, it feels like the old Twitter and it's a lot of fun. There's some of those people who were there early. And when I say early, those people who were there two weeks ago, they're very upset that their culture is not the predominant one there, too much people just fucking around and having a good time. But they need that.

If you actually want to take on Twitter or provide just a good alternative, you need just that assortment of different communities on there. It's very reminiscent of old Twitter. Like the CEO of blue sky was begging users the other day to stop calling posts. Because that's what these shit posters decided to just randomly assign. Cause you know, Twitter's got tweets. Why are we just calling, why are we just calling the blue sky post posts?

Let's call them skeets. And if you want to look that word up in the Urban Dictionary, there's another meeting there. Yeah. I think it's interesting, right? Because as you're saying, the people who were on this platform before were very kind of the tech people, the people who are interested in the decentralized web and that sort of stuff. And these are also the people who lead the project, right? People who were, you know, kind of crypto evangelists. The CEO was one of those people, a big crypto booster. These are some of the people who are leading it, right? And you see that some of the people who were there early are really frustrated that these people have joined the platform who don't give a damn

about their kind of decentralized vision for what this could be. They just want a platform where they can have fun. And it seems like that's almost maybe potentially one of like the biggest risk that the platform faces is continuing to kind of charge in that direction when you have a massive user base that doesn't really care so much about that. And if it kind of changes the experience and makes it more difficult, makes it a more mastered on like experience, maybe then, you know, you're going to lose all of that kind of energy that has arrived in the platform that maybe some of them don't like, but it's also how you potentially create something that's going to be bigger than what they might imagine, I guess.

And also what they want to do with Blue Sky is what hurt Mastodon because Mastodon was already doing it. The vast majority of regular, normal, non-techie lay people, when they were looking for a Twitter alternative and they heard about Mastodon, before joining Mastodon, you have to figure out which Mastodon server you want to join because Mastodon is decentralized.

It's the Fediverse. There's different federations that exist and you need to pick one to join. And people don't want to do that. People just want that centralized platform where they know everyone's going to be at. They want to go to the cool party that everyone's attending. They don't want to have to figure out which little secret club they got to join and whether they're getting all the content that they want from just that secret club. Blue Sky wants to do something like that, but they're not there yet.

So all these users sort of found Blue Sky at the perfect time because if Blue Sky already had that, the popular power users from Twitter who came there, they would have just avoided this like they avoided Mastodon. And so it'll be interesting to see if blue sky alters how they go forward because i can't imagine the people who are on there now would be into moving their stuff to a different server and figuring out what server to go to they had to deal with their first nazi on or i should say their first open Nazi on Blue Sky, because clearly someone invited this guy because he had an invite,

which I don't know if they know who. But an open Nazi was on Blue Sky the other day. And there was a small debate about whether Blue Sky should step in and remove this user because it's a decentralized platform. And what they ended up deciding on was, yes, we could

remove them from this blue sky server, but once the federated universe exists on blue sky, that Nazi will be welcome to join one of the other blue sky servers that welcomes that Nazi. I mean, this is sort of the thing that Elon Musk has to deal with when he promotes a free speech platform, right? In my view, if you want to create a free speech platform, there's nothing holding you down legally that says you must give free speech on your platform. So let's just get that out there. But if you actually just want a platform where anything and everything goes, I always say you got to go full board with it. If the whole idea is all speech is equal and you don't want to put your thumb on the scale, then you cannot have an algorithm that boosts any

content. Just let it all rain down and let people find what they want. And what you'll find, in my opinion, is people hate the platform because they're seeing garbage. And of course, advertisers won't advertise on the platform. So you do need moderation for that reason. And eventually, you'll decide you do need to put your thumb on the scale and actually build an algorithm that promotes very good content because that's what's going to facilitate more use of your platform. And eventually, that idea of everyone being equal on your platform goes straight down the tubes because that's just how it works. Some people are just going to create better content.

Some people are just going to have a larger fan base that follows them there and helps that content get more reach. It's just how these platforms work. I've said too, listen, I think some of Musk's ideas are good. I've agreed with some of the things he wants to do. The problem is he hasn't actually done any of them. He said, we should have a system that doesn't permanently ban an account. You do something wrong, you get a one week suspension, do something wrong again, maybe a six month suspension, do something wrong again, two years suspension, and then on and on

and on. But there's always a timeframe where you get to come back. He's not upheld that. He's, without any real explanation, just decides to ban certain users that piss him off, like Kanye West. He just randomly decides, yeah, Kanye was posting swastika and Musk didn't like that, so he banned him. Kanye, as far as I know, doesn't know a timeframe where he could come back. And also, I could honestly, seriously find right now, give you dozens of users posting swastikas right now, and they're not getting banned. He doesn't want to bring back Alex Jones. Why? We could agree that we don't want Alex Jones on the platform, but if you're going to go by those rules, Alex Jones has been suspended for

like two, three, four years now. Give him a timeframe to come back. That's your rules. Why Alex Jones can't come back, but what's his face? Roger Stone could come back. Chad Loder, extremism researcher who's hated by a number of right-wing internet personalities, just randomly banned. If Chad Loder posted a tweet that broke your rules, take down the tweet like you said you would. Why is this whole account banned? If he broke numerous rules, okay, let him know what rules he broke and give him that timeframe on when he could come back. But he doesn't have that either. He also said that we would just take down individual policy breaking tweets, or we would limit reach, aka shadow ban, those specific

tweets. But we would let users know that we're doing that so they could appeal that decision. And we wouldn't put that shadow ban on the entire account, just that tweet. Yet, just the other day, literally the day after they announced they're going to officially roll out the label that lets users know that a specific tweet is shadow banned. Just a day later, a bunch of users reported this right-wing MMA fighter, Jake Shields, who tweeted that people who support trans kids like teachers and doctors should be executed. They removed that tweet, but then they took it a step further. screenshots of that Jake Shields tweet and screenshots of pointing out all the Twitter blue subscribers who were supporting that sentiment of executing those people for supporting trans kids. Twitter did a move that I've never seen the old Twitter ever do. They took down the photo

screenshots from the specific tweets, not take down the entire tweet, which would be a process where the user gets notified that the tweet is taken down, give them a policy in which that tweet was taken down under, and then also give them the opportunity to appeal it. No, Twitter went in and specifically removed content from within specific users' tweets. I've never seen anything like that before Musk took over. And that is just honestly wild. Yeah, I think it's an important thing to point out. And I think it just shows the further kind of issues, the inconsistencies with what Musk has said,

and really the problems with his management of the platform and how he's just a complete hypocrite who doesn't have a clue what he's actually doing. Matt, it's been great to talk to you. It's been great to go through all of this from the issues with the Twitter blue checks and Elon Musk taking over right to whether something is actually ever going to replace Twitter or whether we're just kind of stuck on this hell site with Elon Musk making crazy decisions in perpetuity. I really appreciate it. You know, keep up the great work and thanks for taking the time to chat.

Oh, thanks for having me. Always a pleasure. Matt Bender is a reporter at Mashable and the host of Scam Economy and Doomed. You can follow Matt on Twitter at Matt Bender. You can follow me at at PowerSmarks and you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham

and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. And if you want to support the work that goes into the show at TechWon'tSaveUs. TechWon'tSaveUs is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. And if you want to support the work that goes into the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.