Monetization is ruining Twitter
Monetization is ruining Twitter
Twitter already had a currency that drove it. Moment 487
A little over a year ago, in July 2023, Elon’s Twitter had the idea to reward Twitter users with bigger payouts the more impressions they get. More specifically, the payouts are tied to the number of ads served in the thread below it. Incentivizing interesting content by pay-outs sounds like a grand idea.
But it’s ruining Twitter.
Imagine that a company was rewarded not by how many people buy their product, but by the number of people arguing about the product in the company’s feedback section of their web page. Companies would no longer be interested in building great products. Companies would instead evolve to cause trouble, so much trouble that consumers attack their feedback page with vitriol.
Reward companies by the number of impressions on their feedback page and you thereby destroy the free market. For the same reasons, these social media monetization pay-outs destroy free expression.
Free expression is more than just getting the state, the social media companies, and the populace to be tolerant of opposing speech.
Free expression also requires that the “life blood” of social networks flows. That life blood is reputation, or social capital.
They’re trying to replace reputation with monetary rewards, but the monetary rewards aren’t even remotely mimicking the way that reputation flows through the network.
When a social network is properly functioning, reputation gets preferentially accumulated by people who say things that are right. These monetary rewards not only fail to mimic the movement of social capital, but undermine it.
For more information on how social networks and the public square relies on the healthy flow of reputation, see Dr. Tim Barber and my book, Expressly Human, and the Science Moments below from my series at YouTube and Rumble.
