Elon Musk’s on-again, off-again romance with Twitter has resumed along with his tweet: “Shopping for Twitter is an accelerant to inventing X, the every part app”. With the hypothesis of Twitter turning into a “superapp“, Elon Musk’s Twitter chats from earlier this 12 months are additionally doing the rounds on the web.
In Exhibit H of the authorized doc, which the courtroom determined to make public on September 28, Musk is seen chatting extensively about Twitter and sometimes steered and obtained options on easy methods to make Twitter higher. So what precisely would Twitter appear like primarily based on these chats, and as soon as it’s below Musk’s management?
Blockchain Twitter
Everyone knows about Musk’s love for superapps like WeChat, and if we give attention to his personal admission concerning this in a podcast, we get a good understanding of what his plans for the microblogging website could also be. “WeChat is an efficient mannequin — and principally consists of features of Twitter, PayPal and lots of others,” he mentioned.
Within the chats, he talks a couple of blockchain social media system that does each funds and quick textual content messages or hyperlinks like Twitter. Moreover, Musk says that customers must pay a tiny quantity to register their messages on the chain, which is able to lower out a overwhelming majority of spams and bots. “The thought of blockchain free speech has been round for a very long time, the query is easy methods to implement it,” he mentioned.
Musk later mentioned, “Blockchain Twitter isn’t attainable, because the bandwidth and latency necessities can’t be supported by a peer-to-peer community, until these “friends” are completely gigantic, thus defeating the aim of a decentralised community.”
Whereas it’s inconceivable to foretell what the brand new characteristic may very well be primarily based simply on this dialog, it’s protected to imagine that Twitter could have a fee mechanism (perhaps primarily based on blockchain) in place, which can additionally help in gathering membership charges.
Membership plan
If we go by Musk’s earlier conversations, Twitter is probably not free-to-use after Elon’s takeover. At the very least, not wholly. As an example, in Might, he tweeted how Twitter received’t be free for some organisations, however free for informal customers. “Twitter will all the time be free for informal customers, however could come at a slight value for business/authorities customers.”
Within the just lately publicly launched chats, American web entrepreneur and podcaster Jason Calacanis was seen advocating for membership charges to be charged from people in addition to organisations. He proposed charging $50-100 a 12 months from people and $10k from companies for memberships, to which Musk replied, “You’re a thoughts reader”.
Not simply that, paid DMs had been additionally talked about within the discussions. Calacanis proposed that influencers be made to pay $.01 per DM (500,000 followers = $5,000) to have the ability to DM their followers, a characteristic they may use to market their forthcoming vlogs, blogs, books, podcasts, and so forth. Based on him, the tactic could be spam-proof since followers will unfollow influencers who ship too many messages.
Twitter creator program
One other factor that catches consideration within the mail is Musk’s give attention to creators and easy methods to incentivize them. A contact saved as ‘Viv Hantusch’ contemplated over how Twitter can permit high-res movies with an in-app fundamental video editor. She additional wrote, “It could have fairly a huge impact, I believe, particularly helpful for citizen journalism and enjoyable academic content material. May even assist Twitter regain market share misplaced to TikTok.”
To this, Elon mentioned that as a result of Twitter will not be at the moment monetising movies, it could be a loss for each Twitter and people who add.
The digital titan may be noticed contemplating giving creators an incentive to publish first on Twitter. Based on Calacanis, Twitter can monitise movies and distribute ad-revenue splits with the very best within the enterprise. As per an article by Medium, Elon needs to rent Mr Beast as a devoted Twitter creator who would observe different content material suppliers as properly.
The ultimate phrase
Whereas these chats are a couple of months outdated and lots of issues have modified since then, they do present an perception into Musk’s thoughts and plans for Twitter. What we are able to positively count on from Musk is end-to-end encrypted messaging in Twitter, in addition to a crypto funds gateway. The creator programme could assist Twitter achieve recognition, though it’s unclear whether or not Twitter will present prolonged or quick video codecs.
Moreover, the addition of creators like Mr Beast to Twitter will be sure that Twitter’s person base grows dramatically. Once more, every part steered right here was mentioned by Musk a couple of months in the past, and the prime prerequisite for all of this could be Musk getting his palms on the microblogging web site.
