At this point with all its chopping and changing, we must ask ourselves what do creators really want from Twitter at this painful point?
Essentially, this was always Musk’s goal; while plenty of creators have Twitter accounts, it’s not typically the social network they pour the most energy into. There are often more lucrative opportunities for sponsorships on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, where they can also reach far more fans. But Musk, who has certainly ramped up the urgency inside Twitter’s product team, has a shot at changing the social network’s reputation.
In regards to how creators themselves feel about this, here are some direct quotes;
“I don’t want it to be a TikTok clone,” said Annie Rauwerda, who runs two accounts on Twitter called @depthsofwikipedia (719,000 followers) and @internetdepths (52,000 followers). Her first account also has more than 1 million followers on Instagram. On Twitter and Instagram, she mostly shares screenshots from Wikipedia pages with short comments. “I don’t like posting videos,” she said.
On Twitter, the draw for her is that “it feels like there’s more of a conversation,” she said. “You can reply with links.” Other features such as replies and quote tweets, which allow users to share another person’s tweet with their comments, “make for a more lively community feel,” she said. On Instagram, in contrast, witty user comments often get buried in a thread.
In regards to what Rawerda would like to see from Musk’s Twitter, her requests are pretty straightforward; more demographic data about who follows her on Twitter, such as the gender breakdown of her audience, and a point person at the company she can call if there’s ever an issue with her accounts.
Before Musk took over, Twitter had tried to introduce more tools for creators to generate income on the platform. The company launched a tipping feature and Super Follows, now renamed Subscriptions, where fans can pay for bonus tweets. Neither brought in significant revenue for creators. More recently, it started showing the total number of times a tweet has been seen.
Samantha Matt, who has a Twitter account with nearly 4,000 followers as well as an Instagram account with 100,000 followers, also hopes Twitter won’t stray from its roots as a text-first platform. Part of Twitter’s appeal is that posting doesn’t require her to edit videos or stage the perfect picture. “You don’t have to put this whole production together,” she told me. “It’s just a great place to tell jokes and express yourself.” According to The Information, her main request for Twitter as a platform is that it address misinformation. “I personally don’t want to use a platform that’s spitting out misinformation,” she said.
