[zhte415]

The Twitter customer is an abstract concept. There's no answering to a single perhaps unpredictable customer, simply a collection of metrics. On aggregate these metrics are real, but individually they are not [1].

To take a car analogy. Imaging Twitter was a mechanic's garage. A customer has their exhaust fixed. But the main point of coming to your garage is to hang out with everyone else in the cafe talking about their car parked outside in the parking lot. And as everyone else uses your garage so does this customer. They could use the Mastodon garage chain and would get their exhaust fixed but they don't coz the point of their car isn't to get from A to B but to show off their car of which the garage cafe and parking lot is a big part of the experience.

But they think you could do a better job, so they buy 9%, or 14%, or some %, of the garage. Now you're worried your garage product, largely satellite to the core product of a garage long since fixed, the core service of your garage is infact provided for free in your garage as it is in the Mastodon garages, might get criticised. Say, you bake cinnamon brownies in the cafe. People buy your buy your brownies. But it's never that clear they buy your brownies because they're good brownies or just that people need something to snack on in the garage while they hang out looking at their cars. Perhaps this new owner doesn't like the brownies. Perhaps they love them. Perhaps they don't care, ignore them, but have big ideas for improving the seating or cleanliness of the bathroom. Who knows. Now, for the first time perhaps in your life, you're actually answerable to a customer with a voice.

[1] This excludes conventional media juggernauts and Twitter's deal with them to steer the platform to what it is now.