Disclaimer: This is pure speculation
I have no crystal ball, and there's always the possibility Elon's inflated ego could get the best of him while he thinks he's playing 4D chess. It's also possible that his strategy will pay off in some other way I am not seeing right now. BUT...based on what I'm observing this is what I think is going to happen to Twitter in the not-so-distant future.
Elon isn't going to hire a new CEO until Twitter fundamentally changes
That is because Twitter, as a company, will be shut down or completely reorganized into something different. Why? Read on.
Jack Dorsey believes Twitter should not have been a company
Instead, the original CEO of Twitter believes it should be an open source protocol, and told Musk the same.
The protocol is in active development
Check out the AT Protocol. It attempts to resolve some shortcomings other social platforms have, such as giving content discovery and curation to third parties.
This could enable users to take the ever-present issue of online harassment and bullying into their own hands by implementing their own tools to fight back rather than wait for the Twitter CEO to realize that it's a problem. For example (one out of myriad, to be sure), Jack knew that Antisemitism was a problem on Twitter and confirmed to the Israeli tech influencer Hillel Fuld that the Twitter team would do something about it. 5 years later, those words seem to have rung hollow. Perhaps Jack now hopes that this protocol will finally enable users to address this?
What I'm guessing will happen
I can see Musk working to run Twitter aground and then reorganizing Twitter into an open source foundation that funds and oversees the AT Protocol, among other open web protocols. I could also see Twitter running the "reference implementation" of the AT protocol and offering premium paid support for others who want to deploy their own implementations (much like how Gradle and Kafka are open source but have premium paid services today).
This could bring unprecedented freedom in the form of enabling individuals and organizations taking complete ownership of their social platform rather than having it shackled to a few walled gardens.
The vacuum caused by the collapse of Twitter will result in several companies offering social media hosting and platforms based on the AT Protocol. The less technically adept will flock to these. The more technically adept will self-host their platform much like a handful of users self-host Mastodon instances today.
What will be a major challenge to all this are the layers of legal ramifications such as those Mastodon approached during its moments of growth in late 2022.
Conclusion
The Twitter Endgame may involve the end of Twitter as we know it right now, but I am hopeful that the purpose in this is to replace it with something better. Even if Twitter doesn't fully run aground, I fully plan to utilize the AT Protocol as soon as it reaches some degree of usability since I am a big believer in completely owning my online platform someday instead of depending on social platforms for reach.
Top comments (1)
I don't think Elon Musk really has a vision for twitter. He mostly just wanted to fix a couple of things he thought were obviously wrong with it and hopefuly turn it into a profitable company. Time will tell if he succeeds but I think he mostly made sensible decisions while being so obnoxious about it that he (and twitter) suffered an opinion backlash.
What's amusing is that he opened the way for other companies to make the exact same decisions without being criticized as much. Like firing 20% of the workforce (which every single large tech company did a few weeks/months after twitter), or making users pay for verified accounts (which meta did a couple of months later).
From a technical perspective though ? I don't think he really cares, and once he moves on to something else it will be back to business as usual.