Twitter II

 

I Won’t Dance

I know that music leads the way to romance
So if I hold you in my arms, I won't dance
I won't dance, don't ask me
I won't dance, don't ask me
I won't dance, madame with you
My heart won't let my feet do things that they want to do 

I won’t Tweet, don’t ask me!

It is very amusing to watch the panic of the Twitter users that are trying to find a new home now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter and enacted policies that some users find distasteful. My favorite line was from Tom Bergeron who said “Hello, I Musk be going.” This was a Groucho Marx reference for the Gen Z-er’s in the crowd. Leaving Twitter has become the new moving to Canada. Because Elon Musk has taken Twitter private,  even those controls of a publicly traded corporation such as shareholder votes are not available.

Social media companies such as Twitter are an interesting economic class. They are not private goods which are rival, i.e. priced; and exclusive, can not be used by anyone else while they are being used. Twitter posts seem to be free, unpriced, and the whole point of Twitter posts is that they are the opposite of exclusive.  They can be read by anyone who is following the Twitter user. From the perspective of the user it is free, but from the perspective of Twitter it is not free. The information of those users is sold by Twitter to advertisers. To the users, buyers, they are a common resource, like clean water, while to Twitter, the seller, it is a private monopoly, like cable TV. However the value to the advertisers is the number of users. If the users vanish, the value to those advertisers also vanishes. Elon Musk may eventually discover that he paid $44 billion for a company that has no Tweeters and thus no value.

I was not a Twitter shareholder and I was not a Twitter user. While I may be dismayed by the demise of print newspapers, you young Padawans do not despair. Just as there was Usenet, before MySpace, before Twitter, somewhere there will be a new home. Follow away.