American View: Why Is Organisational Collapse Hard to Recognize from the Inside?

Management

I want to talk about perspective and how it blinds us to deterioration. This is (I believe) a constant factor in decaying corporate cultures and how their leaders fail to recognize the indications of degenerating standards. Companies seem to begin their metaphorical death spiral claiming that everything is going fine, and their future is bright. While we’re all quick to label those sentiments as wilful deceptions afterwards, I suspect many such assertions might be honest. People don’t recognize the rot that will eventually bring their organisation down until it’s too late to correct.

Let’s use a former social media giant as our practical example: When “Élan Muck” ^[1] purchased Twitter for an inconceivable $44 billion in 2022, pundits, news readers, and late night comedians bemoaned the “end” of the social media giant. We were warned that Élan’s promise to “get rid of all the bots” that were befouling The Discourse™ would fail. They warned that Twitter’s service would get increasingly worse until most users and advertisers abandoned it for other platforms. They told us the site would quickly be overrun by violent extremists and virulent bigots in the guise of Élan’s preposterous “commitment” to “free speech.” That within a year, the only users left on Twitter would be bot accounts posting pornography and hate speech in one another’s feeds.

It’s been about 18 months since the internet’s favourite social feed changed hands. Did all the doomsaying predictions come to pass? Is Twitter doomed? Has every human user abandoned it for greener pastures? I’d argue that the answers are Not Quite, Yes, and No respectively.

If you’re thinking, “didn’t we tolerate a slew of ‘one year on’ articles with this same premise back in October 2023,” you’re absolutely right. I re-read several of those pieces while drafting this column. Kevin Hurler’s quote in Gizmodo broke me out of my writer’s block with the line: “Please note: This article will henceforth refer to the platform as Twitter because X is a stupid name.” My sentiments exactly.

I feel it’s important to point out that Twitter isn’t dead. It’s in terrible shape, yes; if it were a person, I wouldn’t ask Twitter to climb a flight of stairs. It’s in such bad shape that there doesn’t seem to be an “end game” strategy that will keep it out of bankruptcy. It gets worse with every random change that Élan announces, too. ^[2] The site barely works on its best days. When it works, it tends to bury the tweets I want to see under a thick blanket of garbage: mostly inappropriate ads and sponsored hate speech.

The Greater Internet *$&%wad Theory is, for my money, the defining scientific revelation of our age.

I did an informal inventory of my feed last week on a run of 120 consecutive posts and broke them down into five categories:

Tweets from people I follow and want to see: ~38%
Tweets Twitter’s algorithm thought I might like: ~31%
Labelled advertisements: ~19%
Unlabelled ads and surreptitiously paid promotions: ~11
Outright hate-fuelled garbage pushed by Twitter’s algorithm: ¼ of 1%

To be transparent, I still use the “For You” pane in Twitter’s user interface. I know I can get a much higher ratio of my follow’s tweets to Twitter’s “suggestions” if I use the “Following” pane instead. I try that every now and again to see what’s different between the two feeds. What doesn’t change, in my experience, is the ratio of labelled ads and “stealth ads” in my daily doom scroll.

As relevant examples from this sample, Twitter placed two unlabelled ads in my feed for cannabis businesses; not to buy cannabis products, but for tools to help run a pot dispensary. Weird ads like these aren’t an annoyance. Either Twitter’s algorithm is broken (a plausible hypothesis) or these customers were desperate enough to spam millions of users in the hopes of getting a sale (also plausible).

I find the “stealth ads” annoying, but not a deal-breaker. These are the tweets that aren’t properly labelled as ads but were almost certainly paid for since no one that I follow is associated with them and they don’t correspond to any of my clearly established interests. If anything, I’m more likely to roll my eyes at these than to take offense.

You’d think I’d offended by labelled ads purchased by political parties and their shadowy backers, especially the ones holding violent extremist positions. I find their messages revolting but that’s balanced out by the knowledge that those troglodytes paid Élan to shove their ads in my feed. That’s money wasted, as I’ll never give them a cent or think any better of them. Get wrecked, bigots!

The one thing that doesn’t appear in my feed is pornography. We were warned that Élan’s termination of all Twitter’s screeners and quality control folks would lead to a flood of unwanted smut, but … nope. Not here, anyway. Even after Élan dropped Twitter’s pornography bad at the start of June, I haven’t noticed any.

Or maybe contemporary “adult content” titillates viewers with impossible promises of economic stability instead of simple passion. Lust is passé;. sustenance is the new sexy!

Even the amount of truly depraved racist and sexist garbage infiltrating my feed has been low. In the survey I ran, only 3 samples out of 120 consecutive tweets fell into that category. That ain’t much. Sure, it’s more than should appear. I remember USENET newsgroups. By comparison, this amount of garbage is endurable (if not morally tolerable).

Finaly, while the bots have thrived – not lessened – under Élan’s stewardship, they’re mostly just background noise. I’m pretty sure that 20%+ of my “followers” are bots that randomly reacted to one of my dad jokes. Why they glommed onto my pun-filled feed is a mystery, but it’s not like they’re slowing anything down … for me, anyway. ^[3]

To be clear, I’m aware that anecdotal evidence isn’t evidence. That’s my point! As a moderate Twitter user who isn’t an “influencer” (or even popular), I suspect that Twitter’s starting a death spiral but don’t really perceive it. Sure, the experience gets worse with every passing month, but the core users adapt and soldier on. The platform hasn’t degraded enough – yet! – to justify abandoning it entirely. There’s still a strong InfoSec community on Twitter. It’s more like a decaying suburban mall than a sci-fi post-apocalypse war zone. It’s not a place you’d want to visit just to hang out if you have any alternatives, but it’s not a place you’d refuse to visit. After all, we’re only here because there are people here we want to keep up with.

The thing is, my personal experience isn’t compelling (and, I know from reading the reports, incorrect). My little feed experiment was just a glimpse into the problem from well below the influencer echelon. Has Twitter gotten worse? Yes! Have many of my preferred follows abandoned Twitter for other platforms? Also, yes … and I can’t blame them. The security experts and influencers I followed that had amassed the largest audiences and had made the most enemies left once the platform stopped policing abusive behaviour.

That’s the key, I think: the more popular a social media account is, the more it’ll draw trolls and flak. ^[4]. Now that Twitter is completely unmoderated, there’s no one to turn to for help is silencing or booting the frothing hatemongers. For us smaller accounts, though, we’re not really experiencing that. Yes, the site is decaying into a hellscape, but from our very narrow perspectives we’re not seeing the bigger picture.

Twitter’s ratio of signal to noise gets incrementally worse with every passing month. More people either leave the platform or go silent. Many of my follows barely post at all. I don’t think that’s just a Twitter thing, though; I’m seeing the exact same behaviour on Mastodon, BlueSky, and LinkedIn. The people I follow are posting less often, and when they do posts, there’s less of it. Meanwhile the number of ads and unwanted garbage gradually increase.

Twitter was always a landfill even before Élan decided to ruin it. Makes it difficult to recognize where one bigot’s trashy plans became their replacement’s equally trashy plans.

I say all this because I suspect that the same problem affects key personnel in corporate space: as businesses lose their way, make awful decisions, and drive away customers, it’s often difficult (if not impossible) to notice from the inside. The numbing quarterly reports and public announcements always paint a rosy picture of “operational excellence” and “projected growth.” Those lies … er … “positive attitudes”? … never change. I’m sure there were sales weasels on the Titanic offering the folks in the descending lifeboats 20% off their next cruise if they buy now.

An excellent example of this happened during my time at Yahoo! Broadcast: all of the senior engineers I worked with exclusively used a new search engine called “Google” because they thought our own engine was useless by comparison. At the same time, the “mothership” started allowing banner ad sales weasels to start selling live webcasts as if they were a ticked box commodity that were purchased by the case or the six pack. Our stock value plummeted even as management claimed that everything was fine … and that prosperity was “right around the corner!”

That was why so many of our co-workers were emotionally devastated when the surprise layoffs happened. Yahoo! corporate effectively destroyed its crown jewel after blowing over $5 billion on it, making it one of the worst dot com acquisitions’ of all time. Our little Tier 3 Engineering Services team seemed to be the only group in the Dallas office that realized the layoffs were coming and that the business was doomed. Even people who should have spotted the signs didn’t.

This is what I meant by perspective and how it blinds us to deterioration. If you’re not part of your organisation’s “inner circle” where the awful decisions get made, it’s often extremely difficult to realize just how bad things really are across an entire business, alliance, or platform. The steady deterioration happens just slowly enough that most people fail to notice. It takes either an unbiased outsider or someone who’s experienced the same sort of failure to recognize and properly interpret the warning signs.

Additionally, our inherent biases blind us to the subtler signs of rot. I think my Twitter experience illustrates that well. As a guy, I’m not subject to the constant misogyny and unwanted abuse that drives women off the site. As a relative nobody, I don’t draw fire from the trolls that hijack popular people’s feeds for clout and attention. I don’t participate in hate mobs and avoid engaging with rage bait. Out of the 368 million monthly active users on Twitter, I’m not worth targeting. That means my personal experience won’t include most of the egregious signs and symptoms of the platform’s degeneration.

One last note: I always cross-post the URLs for these columns to my social media feeds every week. I’ll still be posting the links on Twitter until it finally goes offline because at least some of my online pals find out about my material that-a-way. I won’t be surprised when it goes under, though.

^[1] I’m 99% sure the dude constantly searches for his own name out of pathological vanity, so we’ll use a transparently thin pseudonym.
^[2] Last week, Élan decided that no one would see who else on the site had “liked” any given post. Icon Mark Hamill then started a trend of replying to liked Tweets with the word “like” to tweak Élan’s nose. It’s been hilarious to watch.
^[3] Most of my tweets are jokes. Unlike the rabid trolls, I enjoy making people laugh and making the world a teeny bit less *$&∞.
^[4] Remember “Gamer Gate”?