Where will the social media giant Twitter be in the next 10 to 20 years? Will it evolve with the times to maintain its dominance or will it become an afterthought of early 21st-century nostalgia? Podcast host Joe Rogan predicts the latter, just like Blockbuster Video.
Speaking on the “Joe Rogan Experience” last week, the podcaster said that people will one day look back on the days of Twitter like they look back on the days of Blockbuster Video.
“I think Twitter’s gonna be like Blockbuster video. I think we’re gonna look back, ‘You remember when we used to communicate through Twitter? Like, oh my God, it was so toxic. Everybody was so mean,’” Rogan said, as reported by Fox News. “We’re going to hit some new thing, next, that is going to read each other’s minds. … It’s going to make this seem like nonsense. There is no empathy in these conversations and that’s a big part of the problem [with Twitter].”
Should Twitter go the way of Blockbuster Video, it will be strictly because a better business model of social media developed that Twitter could not evolve with. In the case of Blockbuster, the arrival of Netflix and improved streaming services rendered the old days of physical video rentals obsolete. Writing at Forbes, Greg Satell argued that Blockbuster could have survived the streaming revolution if it had joined with Netflix in early 2000 when CEO Reed Hastings proposed running the rental company’s online brand:
Blockbuster’s model had a weakness that wasn’t clear at the time. It earned an enormous amount of money by charging its customers late fees, which had become an important part of Blockbuster’s revenue model. The ugly truth—and the company’s achilles heel—was that the company’s profits were highly dependent on penalizing its patrons.
At the same time, Netflix had certain advantages. By eschewing retail locations, it lowered costs and could afford to offer its customers far greater variety. Instead of charging to rent videos, it offered subscriptions, which made annoying late fees unnecessary. Customers could watch a video for as long as they wanted or return it and get a new one.
Netflix proved to be a very disruptive innovation, because Blockbuster would have to alter its business model—and damage its profitability—in order to compete with the startup. Despite being a small, niche service at the time, it had the potential to upend Blockbuster’s well oiled machine.
In May, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aiming to change a federal law that shields social media companies from being sued for content published on their platforms, arguing that those companies have a bias against conservatives.
“The order also seeks to channel complaints about political bias to the Federal Trade Commission, an agency that the White House has asked to probe whether tech companies’ content-moderation policies are in keeping with their pledges of neutrality,” The Washington Post reported. “The order additionally created a council in cooperation with state attorneys general to probe allegations of censorship based on political views. And it tasked federal agencies with reviewing their spending on social media advertising.”
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