Twitter (X, whatever) last-ditch monetization effort

Elon bought Twitter and then laid off like 80% of its employees. In the early days, people were mostly mad at him for doing this. Then business-y people were impressed at how lean the operation was. However, Elon seems to continue to embroil himself in political scandal after political scandal these days. In the early days of Threads (Twitter’s largest competitor), it seemed like 90%+ of the content was people talking about how much they disliked Elon.

I’m not here to opine on Elon. Like most humans, he does some pretty heinous stuff along with some good stuff. It just happens to be that both sides of this spectrum are visible to a large percentage of the population because 1. he’s worth a lot of money and 2. he tweets his mind a lot.

What I do know for a fact is that X has lost a lot of value since Elon took over. Part of this is because of a boycott that happened with advertisers this year, along with some strange product decisions and difficulties fighting bots. There are a lot of reasons, but if I keep writing this will become a Stratechery article, not a newsletter from Soren. Last thing I’ll say, I know people who work at X. They care a lot and it seems like a really tough job. I feel for them.

After thinking about all of this, I wondered what a misguided last-ditch effort at monetization might look like. What if all of your draft tweets got published unless you upgraded to X Premium? Another idea I had was to make bookmarks public (though I couldn’t think of a way to mock this up that was PG). This would be hilarious but also super chaotic.

Realistically, most people would just race to delete all of their drafts. If for some reason they weren’t able to get to them all, the results could be catastrophic for the average user and a huge short-term win for X’s monetization numbers.

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