Just when you think Musk cannot come up with something stupider, he exceeds expectations.
Elon Musk may have come up with his stupidest Twitter idea yet: Limiting polls
https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/elon-musk-twitter-blue-polls-17865227.php
The five months since
Elon Musk took over Twitter have been filled with a glut of foolish decision-making.
Creating a "For You" tab that no one used or liked or asked for and turning it into a blue-check paradise is silly. And unbanning a whole lot of previously suspended users — including ex-president Donald Trump, who
continues to spurn Twitter for his own knockoff — has platformed a
whole lot more hate on Twitter. The site went
haywire multiple times because just a fifth of Twitter’s staff remains. And let’s not forget the whole “
Twitter's current valuation is less than half of what its original asking price was” thing.
But of all the harebrained things Elon Musk has done with Twitter since he took his sink in five months ago, his decision to put Twitter polls behind the Twitter Blue paywall outranks them all in terms of sheer stupidity — the perfect blend of idiocy and vanity.
You see, even before Musk took over Twitter, he had this idea that Twitter polls were a bastion of democratic thought. In March, a month before he started the process of buying Twitter, he ran a poll: “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy,” he wrote. “Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?” A whopping 70% of respondents agreed with him.
The surveys kept coming, and he took them (mostly) as gospel. He’s not alone either. For as foolish as this idea is, a healthy number of people still take Twitter polls seriously — as anathema as they are to the principles of good surveying.
Just ask Team Trump.
Here's a small compendium of the decisions he’s made by Twitter committee.
Vine should return, he said, by decree of an October poll. (He’s since
doubled down on Vine’s comeback.) In November, he used polls to determine whether to bring Trump back to the platform. The vote was a narrow 52-48 split; Trump was unbanned but has reserved his posting for Truth Social. Should banned accounts be allowed “amnesty”?
A 72-28 yes vote.
Of course, that changed once his very unscientific, leading line of questioning got even the slightest bit of pushback. A poll asking
if Musk should step down from helming Twitter — which, to be fair, had over 17.5 million responses — did not go his way, with 58% of users saying that he should step down.
Instead, Musk latched on for dear life to one of his fanboys, who suggested that he should restrict polls to paid members only. (“Good point,” he replied.) Months later, that suggestion — possibly born out of Musk’s bruised ego and definitely coming from a need to provide features for the barebones Twitter Blue — is in effect. He has yet to step down, though, despite assuring that he would once he found “someone foolish enough to take the job.”
Who knows? Maybe he’ll actually step down this time, assuming he surveys users again. Until then, we’ll just have to live with Musk pulling features for free users like Jenga blocks, one by one, until the site fully topples for good.
