Elon Musk Wants You on Twitter. He Hopes You Don’t Regret It.

FILE PHOTO: Elon Musk's photo is seen through a Twitter logo in this illustration. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration//File Photo (REUTERS)
FILE PHOTO: Elon Musk's photo is seen through a Twitter logo in this illustration. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration//File Photo (REUTERS)

Summary

  • Six months into running the social-media company, the billionaire is talking about his own metric of success

When it comes to judging the new Twitter, Elon Musk has created his own measurement of success: unregretted user minutes.

Whatever that means.

Since taking control of the social-media platform six months ago, Mr. Musk has said several times that this is the metric he has in mind as he works to reinvent the company—even if he hasn’t yet defined it to the broader world or explained how it can be measured.

With Twitter, he is spelling out to advertisers what he wants the user experience to be like —“fun and interesting and informative"—as he makes the case that they, too, will want their brands placed alongside his streams of content.

To a certain extent, he is articulating a question familiar to many users of social media: Was that scrolling a good use of my time?

“The optimization for Twitter is: Maximize the unregretted user time," he said last month at a conference where he was wooing advertisers. “It’s not like ‘total number of users’ or anything. It is just total user minutes, unregretted."

Perhaps more important than the math behind his new metric is whether he is able to reframe the conversation around the newest company in his business empire as he faces criticism for the drama around his management of the platform and his outspoken tweets.

Since advertisers pulled back with his acquisition last year of Twitter, Mr. Musk has been trying to assure them the platform isn’t turning into the “free-for-all hellscape" that he months ago pledged it would never become.

A day after Mr. Musk spoke to advertisers last month, a Twitter analytics manager suggested that the metric is still in its infancy, asking users for suggestions on how to craft it.

“This is a difficult metric to measure and means different things to different people," Dan Knob, the manager, said on Twitter. “If the metric had a numerator and denominator where the numerator was unregretted minutes and the denominator was total minutes, which would you be more interested in controlling?"

Mr. Knob didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Soon after taking over Twitter, Mr. Musk began mentioning his metric goal as he tried to position what his Twitter 2.0 would be like, amid a backdrop of concern from users, politicians and advertisers over how social media in general uses secret algorithms to attract and keep attention.

“I’ve heard like a lot of people say, ‘Hey, I spent two hours on TikTok but I regret those two hours,’" Mr. Musk told users in December. “The thing we’d want to optimize for is unregretted true human user minutes."

Mr. Musk has latched onto this still-undefined metric after taking great issue with one Twitter had in place at the time of its takeover: monetizable daily active users.

That metric—and how it was created—was at the heart of Mr. Musk’s effort to get out of buying Twitter last summer, a legal fight he eventually ended when he went through with the $44 billion deal in late October.

Previously, he had claimed the so-called mDAUs included fake accounts. Twitter executives at the time called his attacks misleading,saying his objections were simply a ploy to exit a deal he regretted making.

The mDAU metric was a unique Twitter creation to begin with. The metric eschewed the typical daily active user figures that Meta Platforms’ Facebook and others have long used in Silicon Valley, making it harder for apples-to-apples comparisons with its rivals.

In the short history of the social-media industry, these metrics have been important for advertisers and investors to understand the rate of engagement by users. In theory, the more engagement, the better for business. But there has been concern among technologists about how these kinds of metrics influence algorithms and skew outcomes.

In 2018, Facebook tweaked its algorithm to boost “meaningful social interactions" between friends and family, The Wall Street Journal has reported. While intended to improve well-being, company staffers instead found the change was making the platform an angrier place as publishers and political parties reoriented posts toward outrage.

In the following year, Facebook introduced user surveys that asked, “Is this post worth your time?" and used the feedback to inform how posts were ranked in news feeds. It has since rolled out more ways to customize content, through a “Show more or Show less" option. And Facebook no longer considers certain engagement signals, such as commenting or sharing, when ranking political content.

And what do people really regret?

“If I look at my timeline, I don’t generally regret reading individual tweets," former Facebook data scientist Ravi Iyer, now managing director of the Psychology of Technology Institute, wrote in a Substack essay earlier this year. “Rather, I broadly regret the time I spend overall in life when I look at Twitter reflexively rather than spending time with my kids or my dog."

Mr. Musk has had success before picking metrics that play to his vision. At Tesla, where he is also chief executive, the automaker has long highlighted total cost of ownership when marketing vehicles that years ago were selling well above the average price of rival gasoline-powered cars.

Instead of sticker-price comparisons, Tesla focused on the potential savings to electric-vehicle owners over the vehicle’s lifetime, including tax credits applied to purchases and not having to pay for gas or oil changes.

At the time, the suggestion was a rarity in selling a car. Now it is becoming more commonplace as rivals chase their own electric-vehicle customers

In his pursuit of unregretted user-minutes, Mr. Musk has said he wants Twitter to be more transparent in how its algorithms surface content, pointing to his release of some of the company’s source code in March as part of that effort. The move, he said, allows for outsiders to dissect how the platform recommends posts and treats certain users.

“If you want to trust something, you’ve got to know how it works," Mr. Musk said last month. “Basically you should be able to re-create the probability of a tweet being recommended, based on what we’ve opened source. If you can’t re-create it, then we haven’t shown you everything."

And he has been working to tweak how users see things, including, for a time, defaulting to a “For You" timeline that surfaces recommended tweets, such as from a men’s fashion account, rather than just those accounts followed by the user.

“This will get me canceled but the For You tab went from evil to OK?" Nate Silver, a statistician and founder of the FiveThirtyEight website, tweeted this week.

Ultimately, Mr. Musk’s stated goal is to use Twitter to jump-start ambitions for a bigger business that combines social media with messaging, shopping and finance.

Meanwhile, he needs to safeguard the company’s biggest strength, which he touted earlier this year, as a platform attracting roughly 130 million hours of “the smartest, most influential people on earth, every single day."

He doesn’t want them to regret that time.

Write to Tim Higgins at tim.higgins@wsj.com

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