Maybe Twitter would die if power users could export their clout
Are you a Messi or a Salt Bae? Either way, you're hooked.
I don’t know how to improve Twitter, and I don’t have any ideas for an alternative service that improves upon it. But if we can be real with each other for a second: the quickest way to make Twitter die, if you’re someone who wants it to die, is for a competing service to say the one thing that really matters to Twitter users: “If you like your clout, you can keep it.”
Because the embarrassing fact about Twitter that gets discussed too rarely these days is that it turns hundreds of millions of people, most of whom are adults, into what you see in the debased little scene below: A bunch of Salt Baes at the World Cup, groping at Messi in the hopes that he’ll notice them. This is the revolting social dynamic that gives Twitter all of its power.
Joseph Bernstein of The New York Times wrote an article the other day about Twitter users who would be — get this — relieved if Twitter vanished. The Twitter users who talk to Bernstein for the piece include Dylan Matthews of Vox who has 67 thousand followers, journalist/podcaster Jesse Singal who has 144.8 thousand followers, and Molly Jong-Fast, who has a million followers. “Twitter’s potent brew of breaking news, social competition, professional jockeying, wisecracking and personal abuse has always been an acquired taste, even for the most prolific users,” Bernstein writes. But he barely mentions the fact he’s talking to mostly just the winners of the competition, and they don’t acknowledge having won. It would be uncouth to say “I love how it feels to have tons of clout,” but that’s why they don’t leave. Not because they don’t know where else to read breaking news.
They’re winners while they’re there, and they’re losers if they leave, but if the whole thing burns down, well, at least no one else wins.
If what you’re after isn’t clout, but a community of likeminded people, or a healthy discussion between differently-minded people, other, better fora exist for that, and everyone knows this already. You probably have a private text chain or DM group with some of your friends. Maybe you post to a site like Metafilter, or have your own blog. These are all much healthier outlets than a public chatroom that feels like it contains everyone in the world, where the rich and famous might read and like your joke, and cause some of their clout to rub off onto you. This is why millions of people can never leave, even if the conversations they can have literally anywhere else are of higher quality.
I was a Salt Bae on Twitter at one time, but that’s sort of why it was relatively easy for me to quit: I only had a tiny little molecule of clout. As far as I could tell from looking at my metrics, the Twitter algorithm usually served any given tweet of mine to a couple hundred people, probably because in the rare case when one of them did materialize on someone’s screen, it was greeted with an apathetic upward swipe.
If I’d ever made it to the promised land of Cloutopia where not only is your follower count high, but your posts are engaged with, laughed at, argued about, and generally made to feel important, I’m guessing my addiction would have been more or less permanent.
Best case scenario, Twitter addiction is a little like smoking. If the person across the dinner table from you leaves the room for a minute, you can open up Twitter, form an opinion about someone else’s post — usually a more popular account than your own — reply, or a dunk them with a little witticism or meme, and maybe get a couple likes before your companion gets back. Likes are micro-compliments that give you a little chemical boost to the brain, like nicotine.
In the rare case that you get a lot of engagements on a tweet, you suddenly get a dose of clout, which is like your cigarette was laced with PCP. More exposure means more followers, and more followers mean more clout. And that’s if you’re a loser like me. If you’re one of the winners with six-or-more-digit follower counts, you have tons of clout, and anything you post will get all sorts of ego-reenforcing feedback: an IV drip of PCP.
The mere existence of clout obviously isn’t unique to Twitter. You can earn it on TikTok, YouTube, and even Instagram, and these are all, in many ways, more powerful social networks than Twitter. But, as the conventional wisdom goes, the difference is that media types are on Twitter, and they’re available to interact with. Journalist Steven I. Weiss called Twitter a “clubhouse for journalists,” which made it “valuable for journalism as a profession” up until the highly fraught era its currently in.
But an equally important difference between Twitter and the other social networks is how little effort it takes to earn Twitter clout if you have the knack for it. Compared to posting a video blog on YouTube, or minutes-long TikTok post, or even just a good photo on Instagram, a tweet is practically just a belch that comes out of your brain. If you have enough clout, Twitter’s algorithm will make it so your belch turns into a storm of hundreds of belches, all hurting the feelings of your worst enemy mere seconds after it emanated from you.
But for the time being, Twitter clout doesn’t carry over to anything outside the limited Twitter ecosystem.
Look at dril for instance. That account has earned 1.7 million followers, essentially by posting warped little deep thoughts that feel like they emerged from a type of broken, but disturbingly familiar, brain. Being generous, no dril tweet could possibly take more than five minutes to write. More likely, most of them take five seconds.
Outside of Twitter, dril is nothing. He only has about 43 thousand followers on Instagram, and has only posted 74 times. What is apparently the dril YouTube account has even fewer followers and even less activity. The dril Tumblr has been silent for three years. It’s safe to say that dril can only ever earn real clout (Again: 1.7 million people) on Twitter, or someplace very similar to Twitter.
So big Twitter accounts are like rich people whose wealth only exists as Itchy and Scratchy money. It’s fun, but worthless in most places.
In my post-Twitter life, when the mood strikes I’ll occasionally (while remaining safely logged out) browse my way to a Twitter account like dril, just to see what’s been posted in the past few weeks. But one thing I never do, sorry to say, is check back in with what my friends have been tweeting. That’s not because I don’t care, but because I keep in touch with my friends via healthier channels, like talking in person. In small account land, watching a real-life friend post on Twitter often means seeing them in diminished form — as a Salt Bae stuck at the World Cup victory celebration forever. And you don’t want to see your friend going through that. But if the temptation to try and become a big account weren’t there, Twitter wouldn’t be so inescapable.
Most big twitter accounts won’t thrive at a different type of social media site, and if the account holders jump ship for Mastodon, or Meta’s future Twitter replacement, or hey, even Truth Social, one problem among many with that maneuver is that they have to be small accounts again when they get there. Their pockets swollen to bursting with Itchy and Scratchy money they can’t cash in.
And this issue plagues the user experience for small account tweeters at non-Twitter sites as well. After all, without the big accounts with their colossal gravity, it feels like nothing worthwhile is happening. It’s all Salt Baes and no Messis. If there’s nothing to aspire to on these platforms, posting good content is its own reward. That may sound virtuous, but it also sounds far from addictive. You can’t beat Twitter if you don’t slake people’s addictions.
How to actually go about transferring clout to a whole new social media platform is a question for developers, and I’ve intentionally left that part vague. I don’t even know how to calculate clout. A related thing has been tried before, with the now-defunct website Klout, which tried to tally your social media footprint across all platforms and let you leverage your “Klout score” for goodies. If you weren’t already a social media juggernaut, these were usually unappealing, throwaway items like obscure new snack foods, or promotional swag for a mobile phone game. Another problem was that Klout gave far too much weight to your raw number of followers when measuring your Klout score. Actual clout is more complicated than that. There are major celebrities who have high follower counts, but don’t tweet often or well, and so have very little actual clout.
Having said that, follower count is probably the only publicly available metric that can be transferred easily, and that’s a pity.
The phenomenon of celebrities and micro-celebrities transferring their clout from one service to another would be an ugly spectacle if it were obvious, so it should be kept secret, but not so secret that when revealed, people felt swindled. Maybe you could just algorithmically put your thumb on the scale for the VIPs to make extra sure their follower accounts climb to their former heights as soon as possible. In the meantime, perhaps you could provide a “service” for users of your site who used to be VIPs on Twitter that feeds them engagements commensurate with what they used to receive on Twitter, but from an army of bots, sort of like the practice of “heavenbanning” minus the ban.
I never said this strategy would be good, or beneficial to the world, just that it might have a decent shot at killing Twitter, again, if that’s what you’re into.
Clout is measured by how many people will follow someone who announces a platform move.
The writers who could conceivably call me to action in the real world are people I follow cross-platform. That's actual clout above and beyond a mere ad base.
What's your beef Mike.
Lots of folks we're on the pitch post shootout. Lots of folk post on social media programs on whatever; including sport.
Musk owns tweeter as other oligarchs own whatever.
Chill
Post....don't post. Your call