Well, it’s hard to say as an outsider. What is remarkable is that for everyone those view numbers were much lower than they expected, not just for the big accounts.
The idea of showing those views is not crazy in itself. An estimated 90% of active Twitter users do not post, like or retweet anything and only read. So you never saw that in the retweet or like statistics. Then views are a good way to show the activity on Twitter.
Only that has now turned out to be a bit of an own goal because views turn out to be much lower than everyone expected. When I look at accounts with several hundred followers (which should not be affected by the problem cited by Musk) I also see tweets that have only been seen by two or three people.
We’ve probably all been a bit misled by looking at follower count. If you have 100,000 followers, but 40,000 of them have not logged in for at least six months, then you can actually expect a view from only 60,000.
Maybe Twitter is a lot quieter than we thought. Only Twitter knows that answer and it would have been smart to see how many views there actually are before making that information public. But yes, that is not “Move fast and break things”.
