Elon Musk isn’t wasting any time changing Twitter.
Not only that, he’s taken the role of customer service, he’s making fun at the expense of the company’s inner processes, and he’s discussing grand ideas and massive changes with his Twitter followers.
We knew Musk’s era would be interesting times for Twitter, but judging by the Chief Twit’s first three days of reign, it will also be intense.
Take, as an example, Musk’s latest tweet (at writing time). In a poll, he’s asking his followers whether Twitter should bring back Vine, a short video sharing service it acquired in 2012 and shut down in 2016.
YouTuber MrBeast chimes in with a comment. “If you did that and actually competed with tik tok that’d be hilarious,” he says. “What could we do to make it better than TikTok,” Musk replies.
And there you go: Musk is casually spitballling ideas about bringing back a long-dead video sharing service, a feat that would no doubt cost Twitter a fair amount of money, with random people on the internet.
Given the pace Twitter has gone about making certain changes to the site (we’re looking at you, edit button), it’s almost understandable that Musk wants to move things at a different pace. And he’s not stopping at suggestions. As first reported by The Verge, Musk already overrode some internal circuit breakers to make an important change to Twitter’s homepage, which now shows trending tweets and news stories for logged-out users, instead of just a big prompt to log into (or sign up for) the service.
Twitter’s homepage now displays this if you’re logged out.
Credit: Stan Schroeder/Twitter
Echoing the way he sometimes handles user complaints about Tesla vehicles, Musk also replied to a few users promising he’ll help out with their user account issues on Twitter.
In the last 24 hours, Musk has also made fun of an automated, internal email that prompted him to start a management tutorial, hinted at plans to make verification a subscription-only feature while also mentioning the verification process is being “revamped right now,” promised to allow for longer videos on the platform, and said character limits, one of Twitter’s main traits, would “absolutely” be removed. How’s that for three days’ work?
With key execs out of the picture and reports of more layouts incoming, it’s hard to say how quickly can Musk’s ideas (and his followers’ ideas) get implemented. But it doesn’t appear Musk is willing to wait very long before introducing new features — even if a few things break along the way.
