Speaking of: What Elon Can Do to Fix Twitter

We have found ourselves in a fascinating spot right now where the man who opens his mouth the most on Twitter is also the man tasked with fixing the platform, which means Twitter users are being spoon-fed a never-ending stream of half-baked, crowd-sourced ideas day-in and day-out from the man himself.

But not all of Elon Musk's ideas are bad. And despite Twitter's platform and business model being a bubbling tar pit right now, I think there is still massive potential to turn the platform into a genuinely healthy and productive conversation tool for America.

Here are a few things I would think about if I were in Elon's spot right now.

1. Continue with the plan to charge for verification, but tier the price based on follower count. Elon recently announced that the price of Twitter's monthly subscription service Twitter Blue will be raised from $5/month to $8/month, but that higher price will now include some sort of Twitter verification, which is cool and I think something a lot of people will pay for. Trying to make this subscription a "one size fits all" approach is leaving a lot of money on the table, though, as I would love to see this subscription price tiered based on each user's Twitter following. People with 20 million followers should be paying more for their verification and the right to use Twitter's rails than someone with 20 thousand followers, as the service Twitter is offering that person — access to 20 million people and potential customers — is invaluable.

2. Create two different kinds of verification: one for public figures, and one for non-robots. I personally still like that blue checkmarks are reserved for public figures and journalists and whatnot because I like people of note still being clearly identified on the platform. I don't want President Biden to have the same profile designation as the teenager down the block that just happens to have an $8/month allowance. I think users who confirm their identity with the platform should receive a grey checkmark on their profile to prove they are a real human and not a bot, and people with grey checkmarks should have their content promoted above all non-verified users. You will never sniff out all the bots, but you can surely find ways to quiet them.

3. Keep Vine in the graveyard. Whoever at Twitter decided to kill Vine made easily one of (if not, the) biggest business strategy mistakes of the last decade. There is every reason to believe Vine could have evolved into TikTok if it just stuck around and continued to innovate, but alas...the ship has now sailed. TikTok is the most powerful media company in the world, and Instagram and Snapchat are doing everything they can to try and steal a bit of their lunch back. I don't see any path for Twitter to viably compete here with an outdated platform that has no competitive advantage in its own right. The key for Twitter going forward will be differentiation, not duplication, and rebooting Vine will just be blatantly duplicating what other companies are already doing better.

4. Lean into Spaces. There are few companies known for being less innovative with feature launches than Twitter, who treated an expansion from 140-character tweets to 280-character tweets as innovation on-par with the first iPhone. That being said, there is certainly something interesting about framing Twitter as the go-to platform for interesting dialogue, and Spaces seems like the perfect place to continue expanding that dialog-centric brand image. Streaming sites like Twitch and Clubhouse aren't as culturally popular as they were in the heat of the pandemic, but their rapid ascent during that time at least proved there is interest for an audio product of this sort, and I would love to see Twitter attempt to own that space more.

5. Embrace content moderation. Social media will always follow the famous computer programming "trash in, trash out" mantra: the dialog outputted from the platform will only be as compelling as the news information allowed into the platform. You can't have a public square for productive dialog if that town square is allowing misinformation and conspiracy theories into every crevice. You need to use a fine-toothed comb on the content so that the resulting conversation and dialog is productive. That's a platform both myself and I think the silent majority of Americans actually want to use even if the unbridled free speech advocates are a louder bunch.

6. At least take a good, hard look at this super app thing. I'm not sure Twitter has a sound enough user base to really make this super app idea a possibility, but you know. You can't suggest changes to a social media app in America and not suggest they just become WeChat.