Not paying for a free service
Not paying for a free service
I can't believe this site was free
Several years ago, I had an idea for a feature story about the origins of one of the sports world’s most important websites. (That story was later re-reported in strikingly similar detail by the paper of record, without attribution, but that’s a whole other newsletter.) I knew of the site’s widespread use in the industry, but I was struck by a seemingly paradoxical reality among the broadcasters that I spoke to for the story — while they all relied on Sports Reference even more than I expected, none of them paid for the subscription version, despite its then-$36 yearly fee.
That subscription service, now called Stathead, allows you to do deep searches broken down by any number of statistical categories. It can be enormously valuable to a journalist (I’ve used it for many years), as well as a sports information department or PR office (in which I’ve also used it). As good as the free version is, there are simply things you can’t easily research without paying for them. It is a valuable service.
I’ve been thinking about and trying to write about the deterioration in the ways we connect with each other online basically since the beginning of this newsletter, the announcement of which coincided with Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Each of our major social platforms has provided its own window into the human experience and a connection tool strong enough to, at least for a time, perhaps believe that the internet wasn’t a mistake after all.
Facebook connected us with classmates past and present before it became a disinformation feeding tube that turned your most vulnerable relatives into conspiracy-spouting reactionaries. Instagram offered a square porthole to fun and beautiful and silly and stupid places and things and people all over the world before it became a vehicle to sell unrealistic, idealized versions of everything that warp our views of beauty and wealth and make us depressed. And then there’s Twitter. While it may not have ever really been the town square it aspired to be, its ability to instantly and democratically connect anyone, anywhere, to both make silly jokes and break important news made it unlike anything we’d ever seen.
None of these networks function without content, specifically content created by users. Instagram’s search window is like an endless, multimedia museum wall with no white space, curated to your interests. (I don’t really know what Facebook is like anymore, since I haven’t been an active user for years.) Twitter is a firehose of conversations, likewise tailored by the feed you’ve created from people you’d like to hear from. Without that content, especially from the most interesting people on the platform, these platforms are just empty vessels. And Twitter’s particular ability to send tweets from even small, previously unknown accounts massively viral on their own merit — if they were thoughtful, or funny, or newsworthy enough — made it a fascinating check against both corporate and government control of the narrative around events as they unfolded.
In Willy Staley’s brilliant recent postmortem, he pointed to The Miracle on the Hudson as Twitter’s defining early moment. But the world saw its broader power distilled in perhaps the most pronounced way first in the Arab Spring, then later in live reporting from all over the United States, from places like Ferguson, Missouri and Minneapolis. I followed the events in Ferguson, in particular, following updates on the app while listening to a feed from a local radio station, with cable news on in the background. Everything happening on television was at least an hour behind.
Those open channels into any event happening anywhere made Twitter an invaluable tool for news gathering, for any concerned citizen, but especially for journalists. It’s why journalists were so prominent on the app and why verifying many of them (as well as prominent public figures) was a mutually beneficial way to fight disinformation. In its best form, with additional features like an ad-free, packaged subscription bundle to major news sites, one could see the value in paying for a Twitter Blue subscription, which was never supposed to replace verification.
That is not the case anymore.
The platform’s fairly rapid degradation has been a fascinating case study in the ways that the people who run tech fail to understand how any of it really works. I linked to Cory Doctorow’s treatise on tech enshittification back in February’s Pretty Good Links, but it’s worth revisiting.
“This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.”
There is no small irony in the fact that social media’s late attempt to monetize its erstwhile free services is failing along many of the same fault lines as digital journalism’s attempts to do the same. Both overcommitted themselves to an open and free exchange of information; both fell short at bridging the gap between what they believed they were worth and their actual profitability through advertising; both began slashing the benefits of their service for the end user in attempts to cover that shortfall, only to dive into a death spiral of degrading quality and user bases. Finally, both have turned to subscription models to save the day.
But with journalism, the user is paying for content. Whether hard-hitting investigations, compelling features, or simply a newsletter about adult life, the exchange is for the effort and the product being created by someone else. With social media platforms, a subscription is simply for a refined version of the ability to exist within a place in which the user — you — are the one providing the content. At least with Instagram, a subscription for an influencer can allow them to monetize their content for other users, more in the way that YouTube or other platforms facilitate. With Twitter, you’re paying for the ability to do something that you can do for free.
It is telling, then, who is willing to do so, and how nearly universally their disposition is reflected through this decision. These are, largely, people who believed the only reason that their posts didn’t get more traction was because they were somehow being censored, or hidden, or that the only value of a blue check mark was to boost traffic for that user. They believed that by owning one themselves, suddenly their very popular opinions would get the credit they deserved, in the form of likes and retweets. It has been visibly jarring to them, and the source of a great deal of defensiveness, to realize that more exposure to very unfunny, mean-spirited, or uninformed takes has brought them attention only in the form of additional ridicule from which they had previously been largely isolated.
I can’t even entirely fault the blue check brigade for their in-grouping impulses to hand a billionaire $8/month for no reason. It’s emblematic of the way we seemingly deal with every situation we’re confronted with these days. Feel helpless about our democracy slipping away from us? Throw a few bucks at a political campaign. Feel guilty about our complicity in watching and supporting a brutal sport, in which a player nearly died? Throw a few bucks at his charity. We’re so trained to see money as the answer to all of our problems, that it’s only natural to see spending money as a reasonable solution to anything and everything, even when it doesn’t make any sense.
Still, it’s wild that two of the richest, most odious characters in our society are suddenly passing around the collection plate to try to cover for their cataclysmically poor business ventures and actually finding willing philanthropists for their causes.
It also says so much more about those who not just willingly give money to these men, but chastise others for not doing so. It’s not about value — even with a subscription, the Twitter user experience continues to deteriorate. After years of slowly building and curating a verification system to help users better filter disinformation, the decision to throw that away in favor of giving a check to anyone willing to pay $8 blew it nearly instantly to pieces. Laying off most of the staff has led to an avalanche of new spam. And the lack of content moderation got so bad last week that an account (with a blue check) featuring nothing but hardcore pornography was regularly showing up as the top reply to popular tweets, while searching for dogs and cats would return truly horrific results.
As I was putting what I thought were the finishing touches on this last Friday, Musk abruptly announced the appointment of his new CEO (just as Tesla was recalling 1.1 million cars in China), who wants to put heavy content moderation back in place. This has infuriated the inmates that have taken over the asylum, who were already up in arms that a woman was being put in charge in the first place. I encourage you not to look down at just how warped that rabbit hole is, full as it is of brain poison and antisemitism.
Then, over the weekend, Musk made it very clear that his promises of free speech absolutism meant absolutely nothing at all, caving to the repressive Turkish government’s requests to ban opposition voices. He did so just as SpaceX signed a deal in Turkey.
The dual promises of Twitter as a communications platform that could lift the voices that the community valued and that was free from the whims of the rich and powerful had never looked more broken. The platform was never going to survive under Musk’s reactive whims. But it’s still remarkable how quickly he’s destroyed everything that made it worthwhile.
A common refrain in Twitter’s history has been a wonder at the fact that the site was free. Those remarks were always in regards to content. It took a world-historical, terminally online owner to decouple that sentiment’s suggestion from its value. Twitter was a free website. There’s a good argument that the site now isn’t even worth that price tag.