I’ve spent the week wondering this as I contemplate deleting my Twitter account. There are influential people across every sector who have significant online followings who are reluctant to leave but the logic of this is complex:
- In part this is the sunk cost fallacy: a declining user base and declining engagement rates mean the utility is continually diminishing. The perceived costs of setting up elsewhere, particularly given the likely absence of a single replacement platform, buttress an unwillingness to abandon the labour they have put in.
- However you still gain reputational currency from having a lot of followers. If I’m honest the main reason I didn’t delete my account last year, when I had a similar attack of revulsion at X, was so I could add to my promotion application that I had around 10k followers. No idea if it helped but I’m sure it didn’t hurt, as part of a narrative of engagement and impact.
- Furthermore it remains for these people “the quickest, least mediated way to inject information into the bloodstream of political and cultural discourse“. For most academics this is fairly trivial but for journos and politicians with hundreds of thousands of followers, this power remains albeit in a diminished form.
- Finally I think a lot of these ‘power users’ are addicted to the platform, speaking as someone who I guess is basically a recovering Twitter addict. They think in tweets, they crave the dopamine hit of virality and they need an adequate substitute before they can kick the habit.
- There’s still a ‘wait and see’ mentality of people disengaging but being unwilling to actually delete the account.
These reasons create a coordination problem. As long as there are a critical mass of influential users within a given sector, the costs of leaving are non-trivial. But the further Twitter travels along the path of turning into Gab or Parler means the social capital embedded in accounts decreases in value. There will come a point where there’s a reputational hit involved in remaining on Twitter and, if the great unravelling of the network comes, it will rapidly accelerate. But it’s disturbing how far Musk can go without this unravelling taking place.
I’m less convinced than I was that the platform will fold financially, given that Musk does seem to be on track with subsuming it into the GenAI bubble. The real test will be if the bursting of the GenAI bubble goes hand-in-hand with a wider winter for the tech sector (let alone the global economy) in which case the impossible maths underpinning its commercialisation might finally kill it, particularly if the court cases prove onerous and consequentially timed. But there’s a realistic prospect that a hard core of ~200m daily active users remain, legitimated by a small digital elite of mega-influential accounts, fuelling the continued development of xAI on a platform which otherwise becomes a genuinely mainstream version of Gab or Parler.
In other words I think it will either (a) fold, (b) become something even more horrific than it as present, an affectivity engine through which the far-right fuels the GAI-infused stack or (c) gradually unravel into semi-relevance while being kept afloat through Musk’s vanity. If (a) or (c) then any gains from remaining are inevitably short-term and possibly illusory when considered in terms of opportunity costs regarding time/energy invested (b) there’s a moral responsibility to get away from the platform and stop fuelling the development of this complex.
So wtf haven’t I deleted my account yet!?
Mark Carrigan 