𝕏 is the Internet’s dive bar. The drinks have always been cheap, the bathroom faucet perpetually broken, and the whole place has changed ownership multiple times at this point. Ultimately, it’s where groups of friends go to hang out regularly, and that aspect compensates for its rough edges. But you can’t act surprised when a fight breaks out. The 𝕏 timeline is in turmoil over unexpected changes to creator payouts. But I don’t think it’s as bad as it seems. Twitter launched in July 2006, and for 17 straight years, we all posted for free. Sure, people made money by promoting their companies, building newsletters, or pumping their bags, but no one was directly getting paid to post. That changed in July 2023, when the first creator revenue sharing program rolled out. YouTube has shared ad revenue since 2007. It’s crazy Twitter made it to 2023 without following suit. The YouTube Partner Program has been a huge success — you basically make no money when you’re small, but once you figure out how to make interesting videos, you pretty much always get paid, which becomes the budget to level up your content. There are certainly YouTube channels that exist solely to game the algo, but for most serious creators, the Partner Program hasn’t distorted the platform in a negative way. Posting tweets is very different from making YouTube videos. There’s no production value. A tweet that takes five seconds to think of and post can get hundreds of millions of views. That just doesn’t happen on YouTube. The bar for quality is so high over there that getting that many views on an unscripted selfie video with no budget basically never happens. The ability to have no budget and still become popular on Twitter has always made it feel like a local dive bar. There are different little tables where people huddle and feel safe to talk about whatever they want. People like that it doesn’t feel corporate, even though basically all of tech sees it as the most important social network for their business. So how should monetization work on 𝕏, the everything app? I actually think it’s extremely on-brand for payouts to be highly subjective and variable (basically the opposite of YouTube). I’ve always enjoyed that Elon responds to random posts with the laugh-cry emoji. It feels like the chef making the rounds to chat with diners. It’s electric when it happens. YouTube drives enough watch time and ad revenue that it actually maths out to have tons of niche channels making a few thousand a month. But 𝕏 hasn’t yet figured out how to show the same level of unskippable video ads on a viral post to justify stable payouts. So why even try? Keep it random. Keep it chaotic. Keep it fun. Put the slot machine in the corner of the dive bar. Patrons will throw a quarter in every couple weeks just to feel something.