When Elon Musk bought Twitter for over $40 billion, you’d have to search far and wide to find anybody who thought he had a bargain. It will have been a bitter pill for the South African business magnate who comfortably reclaimed his title as the world’s richest man a few weeks ago.
However, as Elon Musk knows all too well, an appearance at the top of the rich list is often only as good as your last investment, and his most recent venture into the world of social media is proving to be a lot more complex than initially planned. Bots are a hindrance for users, and they’ll be impacting the way Musk plans the medium and long-term plans for X. Any strategy will have customer experience at the focal point of it. Customers do not want to be inundated with bots and spam adverts, as many currently are.
A Change Of Direction – Musk’s Gamble
The site formerly known as Twitter is going through many changes, and with many more in the pipeline, any evidence of the old website is a distant memory. The name, logo, color scheme, app, and business direction have entirely changed, and Musk is now aiming to turn it into the “Everything” app. Still, it is being met with vociferous claims from his detractors that his presence is harpooning the iconic social media giant.
Musk allegedly stayed up all night playing video games the night he bought Twitter, and his ex-wife has stated this is something he often does when he is stressed. Perhaps Elon knew early on that not only was this a mammoth task, arguably the biggest of his career, but maybe he had bitten off more than he could chew financially, and it was a $40 billion gamble that might not pay off.
Although Elon is a fan of video gaming, he has alluded to turning X into a hub whereby gamers can stream big eSports competitions and other casino games like roulette, blackjack, and poker.
Poker is an incredibly popular casino game for people to watch and play. If this audience can move from traditional audiences to X, it will highlight a significant switch in how gaming enthusiasts play and watch their chosen game. Watching live casino gaming on online platforms like poker tournaments isn’t an invention. Still, Musk will be hoping that there’s enough of a movement from poker and casino gaming aficionados moving to X so it can begin to cultivate a name as a game streaming platform.
Bumps In the Road
Running a behemoth like X will inevitably lead to some issues, and any site with tens of millions of tweets, posts, or whatever they’re called these days will run into some logistical difficulty. If you’re somebody who uses X often, you’ll have undoubtedly witnessed a sharp rise in bots under celebrity tweets or even your own. Depending on the analyst or expert you ask, they’ve put this rise in bots down to a few factors.
Firstly, the decline in the number of people working at X and an overstretched set of tasks for those who survived the chop means less emphasis is placed on these areas. Previously, bots were considered a minor issue, which you’d come across sporadically.
However, if you look at some celebrity tweets now, the responses are full of spam and bot comments, and it is an issue that appears to be worsening. If the social media giant has fewer feet on the ground monitoring these posts and struggling to manage a workload, this will invariably lead to poorer service. Ultimately, this is the main factor driving the high number of bots.
Other Factors
The rise of AI has also resulted in the hyperproduction of bots responding to tweets with advertisements and spam. AI has permeated many levels of society, from finance to health, passed medical and law exams, and even won photography awards. However, for those who use AI bots to program and respond to popular trending tweet topics to advertise, X has become a perfect foundation, which many people have commented on and noted as a concern.
Conclusion
This bot issue has the potential to spiral. Nobody likes a website or app inundated with spam comments or advertisements. Although X still has millions of active daily users who will seemingly engage with the site no matter what happens, you’d imagine that many will get to a point where they feel overwhelmed with the number of bots, especially people with a large number of followers who have to deal with them several times a day.
As the whole essence of the old Twitter transforms its logo, utility, color scheme, and overall design into something unrecognizable, the emergence of bots will be another detracting factor for the site, and it’ll be a problem that will have to be tackled firmly at some stage, hopefully, sooner rather than later.
