Anil says: “And it’s essential for Twitter to get out of the MAU [Monthly Active Users] metrics game with investors.”
Preach it.
These games with “metrics” that Wall Street loves so much remind me not of lessons about free-market economies, but the Soviet era. In the Soviet Gosplan, the all-important five-year plan, the planners reportedly put the metrics for nail production in the country as a target number of nails. Result: millions of tiny, teeeny nails the thickness of a pin.
Useless, in other words.
So the Gosplanners learned their lesson, and put the nail target for the next plan in weight. Here you go:
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The caption reportedly says:
The worker asks: “Who needs this nail?” and the factory bureaucrat answers “This is irrelevant. It’s important that we fulfilled the plan immediately.”
The lesson here is, if you set up an absurd game, as Wall Street often does, ruled by the incentives of those who set the rules (their quarterly bonus calculations depend on chasing growth for the sake of growth), people will, naturally, game the system and produce the results you want, just as absurdly.
At the moment, sadly, Wall Street is not solely a representative of market dynamics, but also a collective madness imposed upon us by the distorted over-accumulation of capital in the hands of too-few people. This “elite failure” has repercussions beyond my beloved platform: from global warming to revving up global growth (you can’t grow demand if people don’t make money) but in a sustainable manner (because the annual bonus is not the right time-frame). We are paying the price for having surrendered our economy to a game that is not about some independent logic of the market, but the absurdity of accumulating more zeroes in a bank account (which you cannot spend in any reasonable lifetime).
I have a lot of ideas about Twitter, and a lot on my own wish list. I love the platform, most of the time. Contrary to common misrepresentations of my arguments, I’m not against the use of algorithms at all — I’m just terribly worried about algorithmic restructuring designed to make the platform perform better by the metrics that Wall Street (and advertisers) will impose.
I understand that the platform needs to be financed, somehow, and yet I keep hoping for a world in which a sustainable, great salary making a product that connects the world, and opens up so many possibilities for individuals and social movements, counts for more than cashing in those stock options at the highest possible price that the Wall Street madness would value it at.
So, yes, Twitter needs to “onboard” new users better — but maybe, the solution is not to chase a crazy growth in “MAU”, but to figure out how to make it easier for the people already interested in the conversations. Yes, Twitter needs a tab to show people “what you missed” but not let it shadow the feed, unless people want to peek, but also let that be optimized not just for a badly defined “engagement” that creates a rich-gets-richer-cycle until Twitter, too, looks like badly-done cable TV.
To add to the absurdity of it all, investors want Twitter to be more like Facebook, which they would have ruined had Zuck not owned enough shares to tell them to take a hike occasionally. It’s also not possible to replicate Facebook, nor is it desirable. For better or worse, there is a Facebook in the world.
Maybe there can be models that seek user-financing, perhaps in return for some “freemium” features mixed in with other possibilities. Maybe the top executives can decide that the first hundred million dollars is more than they will ever need in life, and focus on enjoying seeing the work they do add something to the world, rather than chasing the next hundred million which will only come if Wall Street’s absurdly short-term goals are met. Making money enough to pay everyone handsomely, and sustainably, while paying all the bills is a great goal. But none of that is about the magic-fairy dust of “MAU”.
May you never produce a three-ton nail, Twitter.