So you've noticed that everyone on Twitter has gone completely insane
I've been on Twitter in some capacity for around 13 years now. At various points it has been helpful, informative, addictive, enraging, depressing, hopeful, enlightening, or some combination of the above. At certain moments in time, such as very early March 2020, it felt like a window into a future. You could get special access to insights that would take weeks to filter down into the offline world.
As an investor, I feel that there is not only alpha in obtaining lots of new and varied information, but there's crazy value in knowing what the hive-mind is collectively getting wrong or right in real time. One personal example was observing in Summer 2022 how everyone seemed to believe that the software business model was broken, a misperception that I was fortunate enough to be able to take advantage of. I suppose I could have gotten similar intuitions from watching CNBC, but the visceral impact of observing this across hundreds of tweets was incredibly valuable and motivating.
Unfortunately, you’ve probably noticed that things on Twitter have changed juuuuuuust a little bit over the past two years. In no particular order, these are the things that I see rising in prevalence to an unprecedented degree:
Actual, real life (not just trolling) Nazis, eugenicists, and white supremacists
A shockingly high number of people who will gleefully mock you if you believe Joe Biden won the 2020 election, or if you've ever taken a vaccine, or if you have anything good (or bad!) to say about the state of Israel
Approximately 90% of the accounts that have followed me in the last 6 months are porn bots
Around 60% of the replies to any tweet are crypto spam bots. The other 40% are people responding with "so what you're saying is that you support genocide in Gaza???"
Real life, elected political leaders are beginning to change their profile photos to laser eyes, send dozens and dozens of tweets per day, frequently falling for conspiracy theories, and are basically losing their minds in public in real time
A shit-ton of blue check accounts who are adamant that everything on Twitter is working way better than before Musk bought the company (??????)
(Quick disclaimer: The Down Round is not a political blog, but we do have a deep distaste for wacky conspiratorial thinking and the broadcasting of obvious falsehoods, regardless of whether they originate from liberals or conservatives.)
The backdrop to all this, of course, is Elon Musk's purchase of the platform and subsequent 75% reduction in corporate headcount (including — obviously — the safety and abuse team) and approximately 80%+ drop in U.S. revenues. Whether active users have dropped off in proportion to the advertising revenues is an open question, though I have a sneaking suspicion that the porn bots who regularly follow me every 12 hours are actually set up by the Twitter HQ team to fake daily active user counts. (How's that for a conspiracy theory!)
All of this wouldn't really be such a huge deal to me if I didn't find it all so incredibly depressing. I really like my fellow American citizens, and I'd prefer not to view all of this as evidence that we're all quickly morphing into anti-vax mini-Hitlers.
I do, however, have a mostly optimistic take on this. Even before all of this happened to Twitter, we already knew that Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People. Some excerpts from the most important Reddit thread in world history:
Wikipedia's most active 1,000 people — 0.003% of its users — contribute about two-thirds of the site's edits…. … One of Wikipedia's power users, Justin Knapp, had been submitting an average of 385 edits per day since signing up in 2005 as of 2012. Assuming he doesn't sleep or eat or anything else (currently my favored prediction), that's still one edit every four minutes. He hasn't slowed down either; he hit his one millionth edit after seven years of editing and is nearing his two millionth now at 13 years. This man has been editing a Wikipedia article every four minutes for 13 years. He is insane, and he has had a huge impact on what you and I read every day when we need more information about literally anything. And there are more like him; there is one user with 2.7 million edits and many others with more than one million. …
He's less prominent now, but YouTube power-user Justin Y. had a top comment on pretty much every video you clicked on for like a year. He says he spends 1-3 hours per day commenting on YouTube, finds videos by looking at the statistics section of the site to see which are spiking in popularity, and comments on a lot of videos without watching them. Maybe he's not quite insane, but he's clearly interacting the site in a way that's different than most people, essentially optimizing for comment likes. …
If you read reviews on Amazon, you're mostly reading reviews written by people like Grady Harp. If you read Wikipedia, you're mostly reading articles written by people like Justin Knapp. If you watch Twitch streamers, you're mostly watching people like Tyler Blevins. And if you read YouTube comments, you're mostly reading comments written by people like Justin Young. If you consume any content on the Internet, you're mostly consuming content created by people who for some reason spend most of their time and energy creating content on the Internet. And those people clearly differ from the general population in important ways.
The above was written in 2018, so this was known far ahead of Twitter's recent heel turn. Like the surprising statistical fact that most of your friends are more popular than you are, most of the content you read online was written by people far more addicted to the Internet than yourself. This is important to remember and mostly explains why the world appears far scarier on social media than it does in day-to-day offline life1.
If higher-than-normal insanity is already the baseline for social media posts, things can really accelerate when users start to notice a reduction in quality of content (say, because the platform fired its entire moderation team and required everyone remaining in product and engineering to be "anti-woke") because the more normal and well-adjusted users become alienated and decide to depart. The quasi-technical term for this is Evaporative Cooling. As the saner people leave, the median remaining user becomes more polarized and conspiratorial, leading to a situation where highly followed (and therefore highly addicted) users are ultimately held captive by their users who reward them by agreeing wildly with the increasingly extreme and deranged takes.
I don't think it's a coincidence that Mr. Musk has employees and longtime friends who are increasingly concerned about what Twitter is doing to his emotional and mental well-being. The predictable consequence of Twitter in its current state is that everyone who uses it will eventually get a brain bleed.
Interestingly, it's the "open-minded," "independent," "free-thinking," "facts-oriented," "free speech advocates" that are most at risk of becoming atomized and manipulated by the (social) media. As The Final Boss of The Internet wrote back in 2013,
The public in the middle, however, don't understand politics, only emotions given to them by TV, and so their beliefs are cobbled together in real time, improvised, as they get "more information." One trending topic at a time, each vacuum sealed to prevent cross contamination. They don't look at things historically, culturally, humanistically, or even selfishly, there exists no system for interpreting "the facts." Compromise becomes impossible, as a simple example, when a "moderate" "thinks" there should be more restrictions on guns, they want gun owners to give up something they want very much-- in exchange for nothing. "But it's the right thing to do!" And the yelling starts, in HD.
Worse, they proudly announce their lack of ideology by branding themselves as Independents-- capital I, a thing, a demo. He willingly lessens his independence to become part of a group.
The "independent" demo actually has all the textbook characteristics of a group most susceptible to propaganda, more correctly "pre-propaganda", and by textbook I mean literally Propaganda.
They consider themselves leaderless. They can have representatives, they can have "evangelists" but they have to believe that their conclusions are all their own, through individual reflection and objective consideration. Interestingly, and on purpose, they believe their brains can handle such an analysis, any analysis. This isn't arrogance. They are told, by universities and the media, that their mind is prepared to do this heavy lifting as long as they are given just the right facts, filtered from the "noise." "Where can we get the right facts, in a world of liars?" Good question, maybe the news?
Replace “TV” and "news" with "Twitter" in the above blurb, and this is how you get Bill Ackman, David Sacks, and Elon Musk2. This is how "do your own research" becomes "Fauci is a pedophile." Self-radicalization masquerading as self-enlightenment.
If there's anything positive to say about all this, it's the following: The fact that Twitter is becoming more insane by the day does not mean the average American is becoming more insane — it means that the average American is no longer using Twitter. In a few years there will be barely any humans left using the platform. It will just be bots arguing between themselves about the JFK assassination.
As Twitter collapses into itself like a dying star, I'll continue to monitor and report back here on events from just outside the event horizon. Wish me luck.
This was made quite explicit to me on the morning of Wednesday, November 9th, 2016. I vividly remember walking towards my office in the financial district of San Francisco and being astonished that businesses were opening on time and regular people were calmly walking to their jobs at the normal appointed hour… didn't those people realize that the world had just ended?? It turns out that the person who most needed to touch grass was… me.
I’m not calling out these three because they are right-wing. You could pick any number of “Resistance” left-leaning political journalists and make the exact same accusation. But they’re top of mind for me because they’re online all the time and in my feed all the time, and so their slide into mocking/condescending conspiricism has been right in my face.