Why would anybody want to read long-form articles on X?

Elon Musk is still hell-bent on making Twitter, now X, into the universal panacea, and is now offering users the chance to post long-form articles if they pay to use Premium+.

The problem here is that this destroy’s Twitter’s fundamental value proposition: its low signal-to-noise ratio. When Twitter invented microblogging, people immediately understood that encapsulating messages in 160 characters was not a limitation but a virtue. Why? Because it allowed users to indulge in skimming, to receive a lot of information in a very short time. In short, we were able to make Twitter what we wanted it to be, based on our timeline, and that idea, that formula, was a powerful one. The appeal of minimalism never stales.

Over time, that value proposition has steadily been diminished. The first changes, the inclusion of photographs and links, made sense, because you could keep glancing through a timeline that was now even more visual, so that with one more click, you could reach a second level that allowed you to dig deeper into the information. From then on, the increase in the number of characters made using Twitter a noisier experience; and now, the inclusion of long-form articles eliminates that differentiation based on reading speed, on the “injection” of information, turning it into a mish-mash.

There are already plenty of places to write longer articles, from creating a personal page to a blog or using other social networks such as LinkedIn. Musk is being short-sighted if he thinks that his platform will be the better for trying to include everything, and it may well be that it no longer serves much use for anything. Furthermore, this will be seen as a desperate attempt to make money by asking X’s most loyal users to pay more on top of what they are already being charged. The upshot could well be that those loyal users, who recognize less and less the service they loved, realize that they’re just not getting much love back.

Anyone who decides to write long articles on Twitter should know that by doing so, they will be paying to work on a platform, filling it with content when they could simply use it to direct that attention to the same article, but located on their pages. This is a bad idea that appears to be taking advantage of people who simply don’t understand how the internet works, and have more money than sense. If there’s one thing you need to be clear about on the web, it’s which resources are scarce and which aren’t. Twitter once had a scarce resource: an understanding of what attention means, allowing users to obtain a lot of information from it in a very short time. But no longer, and so it’s going to become just another timeline. Sites where you can create long-form content are not a scarce resource, there are a lot of them out there with all kinds of features, and the vast majority of those that come to mind are significantly better for that purpose than X.

A pity, really. And a lack of vision. What you might call overreach.

(En español, aquí)