Twitter has been the most used social media app for me for several years. I wouldn’t even consider it as only a social media app. I got my daily dose of news on it, with what’s going on in the world, sports, tech etc. I still like Twitter.
With Elon buying Twitter, and experimenting a lot of new stuff I think maybe it will work and we will have better features rolling out soon. Even with him firing a bunch of employees, I thought okay maybe he wants to run a lean company which is fine. I think there has been a crazy amount of tech hiring in 2020 and 2021 which the companies didn’t need and it had to end something and it ended brutally with so many tech layoffs.
As far as my views, I am actually a little bit conflicted in how Elon is building right now. I can understand iterating fast and shipping things is a way to go and also I appreciate building in public (testing in production) but with Twitter being such an important medium of communication, you need to find a balance between what and how things should be shipped. Consider what happened on 8th Feb —
This plus, certain people not being able to tweet was a bad experience but as a software developer myself I can understand that bugs happen. We gotta learn and make sure the same issues don't happen twice (Unit tests anyone?)
Another aspect is the API limit issue. Twitter API used to be free but now they have introduced some paid plans. Yes a lot of applications built on Twitter got blocked and got down and I feel bad about it. Again as a company it does make sense as they have to have revenue but I feel execution could’ve been better. Slowly rolling out features like this could help maintain trust. A clear path for how API would work for all those applications would’ve been a better option.
In terms of few other features like different check marks or extending tweet word limit, I feel those features are not nearly as important as fighting fake news and spams like these.
Twitter CommunityNotes is potentially a step in the right direction. I think this could be one of the most powerful crowd source features which Twitter will have if they keep executing it well.
Can Twitter also become a WeChat like payment system? If it could, then it will again be a great feature.
Ok if that all doesn’t work, we do have alternatives like Farcaster, Lens etc which are coming up in a very decentralized fashion where protocol is open and people can build their own application. This is potentially a paradigm change in how we see social platforms but they are very new. These are all very cool and promising alternatives so keep watching this space.
I am no rocket scientist or a social media application builder but I feel there needs to be some shift in how these things work. Now if it will be Twitter or some other app, we are yet to see.