Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino are making the same mistake that has tanked other social networks.
By Taylor LorenzIllustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.
OCTOBER 7, 2023, 7 AM ET
During a bizarre interview last week at Vox Media’s Code conference, X CEO Linda Yaccarino was eager to talk about numbers. She said that the platform, formerly known as Twitter, now has 540 million monthly users, along with 225 million daily users, and that “key” user-engagement metrics were “trending very, very positively.”
Yaccarino’s appearance was painted as a fiasco for several reasons. She seemed unprepared, rattled by a surprise interview between Kara Swisher and Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, who was driven from his home after Elon Musk put a target on his back. But what about these numbers? If they are real, then they indicate a platform in decline, which isn’t much of a surprise. Celebrities and high-profile figures have fled; hate speech has risen; Musk's tweets have become erratic and hostile; he’s threatened brands, briefly banned users for promoting links to other social platforms, and is engaged in a battle with the Anti-Defamation League. No one would expect the numbers to be good.
The focus on the user metrics at all, though, belies a bigger problem. A social platform needs to provide a positive user experience. People have to like it. Yaccarino and especially Musk continuously fail to understand this.
You can’t hold users hostage and force them to endure a subpar experience, to consume content they don’t want, and then expect them to return. The social in social media isn’t an empty adjective: History has shown that social platforms that antagonize their own users don’t last long. Yet Musk continues to dismantle and alienate the precise communities that gave the platform its power. He has continued to misunderstand this dynamic, and his hostility toward his own user base shows why X will ultimately fail.
Unlike other types of tech products, social-media platforms are primarily shaped by the communities that embrace them. Users pioneer emergent behaviors; hack together work-arounds, many of which lead to new features; give platforms their cultural relevance; and provide the steady flood of engagement that Silicon Valley leaders can monetize. Many core social-platform functions, such as the hashtag, reblog, and retweet, were not invented by Silicon Valley tech geniuses. Instead, they were pioneered by enthusiastic users who loved the products they were using, and they were only later formalized into the apps themselves.
“The success of any social platform is entirely due to the users; the product itself is a commodity,” Steven Ward, the CEO of Authenticate.com, who has worked in the tech industry for decades, told me. “Anybody can clone a platform; it’s not difficult to build. Even Trump was able to build a [Twitter-like] platform pretty easily. It’s the users and their loyalty to the platform and their passion for it which make it relevant.” Silicon Valley executives who have taken their power users for granted tend to learn this lesson the hard way.
Take Vine, for example. Founded in 2012 by the tech entrepreneurs Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll—and acquired that same year by Twitter—the app skyrocketed to success as the first mobile video-editing platform. The founders should have been elated by their success, but as I’ve reported, they resented the user base of young teenage influencers, many of whom engaged in rude behavior and pranks. The founders had wanted their platform to be a home for content about users’ daily lives, not an outlet for gags and brand sponsorships. They repeatedly attempted to thwart their biggest creators’ success by removing their videos from the popular page; refusing to give them their desired vanity handles; and declining to enforce basic online-harassment protections. After years of mistreatment, dozens of the app’s biggest users fled the platform for YouTube’s greener pastures in 2016, ultimately accelerating Vine’s decline, until it formally shut down in January 2017. (Yusupov did not respond when I reached out for comment during previous reporting.)
In 2018, after purchasing the social-blogging platform Tumblr, Verizon banned all “adult content” from the site. The change was devastating to the platform, causing usage to plummet. The ban “took out not only porn but also a ton of art and artists,” Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Tumblr-owner Automattic, has written. It also erased huge networks of queer and sex-positive users, many of whom had spent years building up followings on the app. Even users who posted benign content were affected. Posts that simply depicted such things as a heart-shaped necklace, LED jeans, a Louis Vuitton bag, a flamingo floatie, and shoes were all removed under the new ban, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. As of last year, Tumblr’s web traffic had dropped by 30 percent since the ban took effect—although last November, the site began allowing posts containing nudity again.
Earlier this year, a user protest caused Reddit to suffer plummeting engagement after the platform made changes to its API, a tool that allowed third-party apps and services to tap into the platform’s data. The update included a controversial policy to charge developers for continued use. Thousands of Reddit communities went dark to boycott the change, which power users of Reddit said would make using the platform significantly more difficult. They relied on third-party apps to moderate and manage their communities, and many subreddits remained dark even after the boycott; the platform’s future is shakier than before.
Anne Griffin, a tech-product manager in New York City, said that whereas other tech products can be less responsive to the whims of users, social-media platforms live and die by the communities they cultivate. “These platforms are fundamentally rooted in users being able to get value, not just from the platform but from each other. If the platform starts getting in the way of users being able to get value from each other and their connections and community, then that fundamentally eats away the core value of the platform.”
Musk appears to be unable to understand X outside the bounds of his own direct experience of it, and that has resulted in users abandoning the platform in droves. “Elon has these really strongly held personal views on what the internet should look like, which aren’t really shared by most internet users,” Rocky Cole, a former online-harm researcher at Google in New York City, told me. “He forces his worldview on the Twitter community, and I think the result is why you’re seeing people leaving.”
Musk’s bitterness toward long-standing Twitter users and refusal to learn lessons from platforms past has sent X into a death spiral. In May, Fidelity marked down the value of its equity stake in the company, declaring the platform worth roughly one-third of what Musk had paid for it. Last month, Musk alluded to a further decrease, claiming a loss in advertising revenue that, by his own math, means Twitter could be worth just $4 billion, a 90 percent drop in value since he purchased the app. He has attempted to cater to a small faction of political extremists, doling out tens of thousands of dollars to figures such as Andrew Tate, but he has yet to introduce any meaningful features that serve the broader user base. Meanwhile, he’s suggested that he may make the majority of the platform’s users actually pay to use the app, and this week rolled out a confusing new change that ruins how links are displayed.
“You can’t successfully force users to use a platform that’s hostile to them—not in the long run,” James Marshall, a longtime software engineer in Berkeley, California, who has built open-source social-media software, told me. “You may get a short-term gain or think you get a short-term gain, but it’s not going to last. Users will continue to resist, they’ll move to other platforms, and your user base will go away.”
Righting the ship would require Musk to recognize that fixing X is more than a technical task. To win users back, Musk needs to humble himself and empathize with users who won’t pay a monthly fee—not simply attempt to force-feed people content they don’t want to see and features they don’t want to use.
Sadly, such skills are often not valued in today’s Silicon Valley, which rewards a Musk-like approach to fundamentally human problems, Caterina Fake, a long-standing developer of online communities and the host of the podcast Ingenious With Caterina Fake, told me. “You see it again and again with the technologists running the show,” she said. “I actually think that a lot of these social platforms, if they had different leaders, could regain the care and feeding of humanity. I don’t think that it’s a problem in the software itself.”
As other platforms rush to capitalize on X’s failures, they too must learn to listen to and respect their users. If they don’t, X will not be the last failed social platform.
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