What if Twitter Looked the Way Elon Imagines it?

From chronological streams to open source algorithms, you’d be guaranteed to have a much worse time.

Carter Gibson
10 min readMay 19, 2022

So. Listen… at this point in the saga, Elon appears to be more interested in wrecking Twitter than purchasing it. Maybe he’ll never purchase it. Maybe he will. We can’t know what his real intentions are, but I do know that the content moderation / community management topics I care a lot about deserve more voices than just Elon’s.

I understand that this is my second time blogging about Elon’s plans to change Twitter. I didn’t intend to create another, but the more I watch Elon share his vision for Twitter, the more motivated I am to share my interpretation of his simplistic, ill-conceived improvements. So here I am. Back at it.

I’ve spent over a decade in community management and content moderation / recommendations trying to expand comprehension of how social networks actually work so that we can make them better. Seeing Elon’s irresponsible and uninformed hot takes on community management is extremely annoying.

My intention writing this is to, hopefully, improve understanding of complex content and moderation issues for anyone curious or being exposed to it for the first time. The way we’re talking about topics I hold…

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Carter Gibson

Community Management strategist & Program Manager | Internal Community Programs Lead @ Google | Excitable Geek | Lover of spectacle | I write about my passions