Whether Twitter is going well or plummeting to the depths of obscurity faster than a poorly made submersible depends on where you look. According to the owner of the platform, Elon Musk, Twitter (or X) is doing well and only getting better.

According to other pundits, however, advertisers and users are leaving as the platform becomes a haven for extremists and fans of Musk.

Keeping abreast of the changes at Twitter has been tough given that Musk fired the communications department and set the press@twitter.com email to auto-respond with a poop emoji. Most changes are announced by Musk himself, often in replies to other users.

Thankfully, the chief executive officer at the firm, Linda Yaccarino penned a blog this week detailing the events that have played out since November 2022. With that said, the CEO left a few things out of her timeline.

Remembering Eli Lilly

First up on the CEO’s list we have the decision to turn verification into a paid-for subscription model. This saw a raft of fake accounts for brands popping up carrying the Blue checkmark that once conveyed that an account of a brand of well known person. Among the trolls, a fake Eli Lilly account appeared declaring that insulin was free, obliterating a reported $15 million from the pharmaceutical company’s market cap in an instant. There was so much chaos with this move that Twitter Blue was suspended until it could be reworked and fixed.

This also saw advertisers retract from the platform as it launched “enhanced performance advertising solutions” according to Yaccarino’s timeline.

December saw the relaunch of Twitter Blue with enhanced features such as the ability to upload 60 minute long videos. Alongside this, Verified Organizations were launched for a cool R18 100 per month, Community Notes was rolled out as a sort of fact checking service, a view count was added to tweets and advertisers were given greater control over where their advertising was placed. These features were limited to certain countries and would only become available globally in and around April 2023.

A host of new profile labels were launched and Elon Musk polled users about stepping down as CEO.

This was also the month where Musk banned ElonJet, the account that tracked his private jet after an encounter with a “crazy stalker”.

We should also note that Yaccarino doesn’t mention the thousands of employees that were fired when Musk became owner.

The timeline waltz

In January Twitter changed the Home and Latest tabs to For you and Following. For you, would show users popular content from across the platform while Following showed a chronological view of tweets, the default for years.

The problem was that the For you tab was the default for all users. While this was changed on the web by late January, it wasn’t fixed for all platforms until early February.

In mid-February it was alleged that Musk had ordered staffers to artificially boost his account after a tweet about the Super Bowl from US President Joe Biden performed better than Musk’s did. This kicked off a campaign from users to block the billionaire.

At the beginning of February Musk also announced that folks would be able to earn money on Twitter through ad revenue sharing. The catch was that those users had to be Twitter Blue subscribers. We would later learn that these subscribers would only earn ad revenue sharing when adverts were seen by other Twitter Blue subscribers, something of a paradox given that Blue subscribers see fewer adverts.

Long form posts got a boost with up to 4 000 characters now available to Blue subscribers. While some have used the functionality, even Yaccarino and Musk still publish threads rather than walls of text.

Money changes hands

March and April saw a big push toward milking Twitter’s users for money and getting creators to ask followers for money, which Twitter takes a percentage of (three percent at first and 20 percent after a person earns more than $50 000).

Blue subscriptions became available globally as did Verified Organizations and Super Follows were rebranded to Subscriptions. This gave creators the ability to put a paywall on some of their content. It’s not clear how many creators are earning good money from this feature, but a quick look at Musk’s fans who use it reveals very few have more than 10 subscribers and even fewer have multiple tweets locked behind subscriptions.

Advertisers were given greater control over where their ads were placed and the Twitter algorithm was open sourced.

In April Twitter also revealed how it would enforce its rules for offenders. A new “freedom of speech not freedom of reach” methodology was adopted. Essentially, rather than immediately removing content that violates Twitter’s rules it would be restricted and therefore harder to discover. Of course, content is still removed only that’s increasingly rare as the Center for Countering Digital Hate found recently.

In the same month legacy checkmarks were retired, a transparency report was published and only verified accounts began appearing in the For you tab.

Solve for X

The last few months at Twitter have seen incremental updates to features for Blue users as the firm appears to push folks toward becoming paying customers. Encryption for direct messages is being tested for subscribers, two hour video can now be uploaded and long form posts getting longer.

The blog penned by Yaccarino highlights Apple posting the first episode of Silo to the platform with a link to Musk’s tweet which quotes a now deleted Tweet because Apple, obviously, deleted the episode.

The platform rolled out a new Highlights tab for Blue subscribers to showcase their best tweets which is, something, video playback has been improved and oh yes, rate limiting was introduced.

This was said to fight “scam and bots” but ended up aggravating users more than anything. These rate limits have been vastly increased or rolled back entirely and it’s not clear whether they did indeed “fight scam and bots”.

Despite all the controls advertisers now have at their fingertips, revenue from advertising is down 50 percent according to the owner. Worse, the company is still cashflow negative.

It’s not clear whether Twitter Blue and Subscriptions are having a positive and notable effect on the company’s income. The platform is now also sharing revenue with creators which is odd given Musk’s comments about needing to be cashflow positive before anything else. We suspect he’s hoping that creators will bring their audiences which is a lot to rest your firm’s future on.

There is one rather interesting event Yaccarino lists for July we hadn’t seen until now.

“Secured first money transmitter license in Michigan, Missouri and New Hampshire,” writes the CEO.

This is the only mention we see of Twitter getting a licence to handle money, something that will be important in every country, not just state, for the vision Musk has for the platform.

In line with that vision, since the end of July, Twitter has been in the slow process of rebranding to X.

Response to this rebrand has been mixed but given how slow it’s going we’ll likely only know whether it was good or bad when the Twitter brand is retired completely.

Until this point, however, most of what has happened at Twitter has been the renaming of features and changes that were walked back. Sure, there have been transparency reports and some good changes such as Community Notes as well as better controls for advertisers but overall in the greater scheme of things, nothing really has changed for the better.

In summation, it has been an okay few months for Twitter but the future of the platform is the same as it was before Musk took over, uncertain.

Whether X can be an everything app remains to be seen. It’s vying for mulitple markets packed with well established, trusted brands are already deeply entrenched in users lives. Uprooting those solutions is a hard ask and frankly, we don’t think somebody as divisive as Musk can make that happen.

[Image – CC BY SA 2.0 Dunk ]