During a bizarre interview last week at Vox Media’s Code conference, X CEO Linda Yaccarino was eager to talk about numbers. She said that the platform, formerly known as Twitter, now has 540 million monthly users, along with 225 million daily users, and that “key” user-engagement metrics were “trending very, very positively.”

Yaccarino’s appearance was painted as a fiasco for several reasons. She seemed unprepared, rattled by a surprise interview between Kara Swisher and Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, who was driven from his home after Elon Musk put a target on his back. But what about these numbers? If they are real, then they indicate a platform in decline, which isn’t much of a surprise. Celebrities and high-profile figures have fled; hate speech has risen; Musk's tweets have become erratic and hostile; he’s threatened brands, briefly banned users for promoting links to other social platforms, and is engaged in a battle with the Anti-Defamation League. No one would expect the numbers to be good.

The focus on the user metrics at all, though, belies a bigger problem. A social platform needs to provide a positive user experience. People have to like it. Yaccarino and especially Musk continuously fail to understand this.

[Read: Why Elon killed the bird]

You can’t hold users hostage and force them to endure a subpar experience, to consume content they don’t want, and then expect them to return. The social in social media isn’t an empty adjective: History has shown that social platforms that antagonize their own users don’t last long. Yet Musk continues to dismantle and alienate the precise communities that gave the platform its power. He has continued to misunderstand this dynamic, and his hostility toward his own user base shows why X will ultimately fail.

Unlike other types of tech products, social-media platforms are primarily shaped by the communities that embrace them. Users pioneer emergent behaviors; hack together work-arounds, many of which lead to new features; give platforms their cultural relevance; and provide the steady flood of engagement that Silicon Valley leaders can monetize. Many core social-platform functions, such as the hashtag, reblog, and retweet, were not invented by Silicon Valley tech geniuses. Instead, they were pioneered by enthusiastic users who loved the products they were using, and they were only later formalized into the apps themselves.

“The success of any social platform is entirely due to the users; the product itself is a commodity,” Steven Ward, the CEO of Authenticate.com, who has worked in the tech industry for decades, told me. “Anybody can clone a platform; it’s not difficult to build. Even Trump was able to build a [Twitter-like] platform pretty easily. It’s the users and their loyalty to the platform and their passion for it which make it relevant.” Silicon Valley executives who have taken their power users for granted tend to learn this lesson the hard way.

Take Vine, for example. Founded in 2012 by the tech entrepreneurs Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll—and acquired that same year by Twitter—the app skyrocketed to success as the first mobile video-editing platform. The founders should have been elated by their success, but as I’ve reported, they resented the user base of young teenage influencers, many of whom engaged in rude behavior and pranks. The founders had wanted their platform to be a home for content about users’ daily lives, not an outlet for gags and brand sponsorships. They repeatedly attempted to thwart their biggest creators’ success by removing their videos from the popular page; refusing to give them their desired vanity handles; and declining to enforce basic online-harassment protections. After years of mistreatment, dozens of the app’s biggest users fled the platform for YouTube’s greener pastures in 2016, ultimately accelerating Vine’s decline, until it formally shut down in January 2017. (Yusupov did not respond when I reached out for comment during previous reporting.)

In 2018, after purchasing the social-blogging platform Tumblr, Verizon banned all “adult content” from the site. The change was devastating to the platform, causing usage to plummet. The ban “took out not only porn but also a ton of art and artists,” Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Tumblr-owner Automattic, has written. It also erased huge networks of queer and sex-positive users, many of whom had spent years building up followings on the app. Even users who posted benign content were affected. Posts that simply depicted such things as a heart-shaped necklace, LED jeans, a Louis Vuitton bag, a flamingo floatie, and shoes were all removed under the new ban, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. As of last year, Tumblr’s web traffic had dropped by 30 percent since the ban took effect—although last November, the site began allowing posts containing nudity again.   

[Read: Tumblr gets the last laugh]

Earlier this year, a user protest caused Reddit to suffer plummeting engagement after the platform made changes to its API, a tool that allowed third-party apps and services to tap into the platform’s data. The update included a controversial policy to charge developers for continued use. Thousands of Reddit communities went dark to boycott the change, which power users of Reddit said would make using the platform significantly more difficult. They relied on third-party apps to moderate and manage their communities, and many subreddits remained dark even after the boycott; the platform’s future is shakier than before.

Anne Griffin, a tech-product manager in New York City, said that whereas other tech products can be less responsive to the whims of users, social-media platforms live and die by the communities they cultivate. “These platforms are fundamentally rooted in users being able to get value, not just from the platform but from each other. If the platform starts getting in the way of users being able to get value from each other and their connections and community, then that fundamentally eats away the core value of the platform.”

Musk appears to be unable to understand X outside the bounds of his own direct experience of it, and that has resulted in users abandoning the platform in droves. “Elon has these really strongly held personal views on what the internet should look like, which aren’t really shared by most internet users,” Rocky Cole, a former online-harm researcher at Google in New York City, told me. “He forces his worldview on the Twitter community, and I think the result is why you’re seeing people leaving.”

Musk’s bitterness toward long-standing Twitter users and refusal to learn lessons from platforms past has sent X into a death spiral. In May, Fidelity marked down the value of its equity stake in the company, declaring the platform worth roughly one-third of what Musk had paid for it. Last month, Musk alluded to a further decrease, claiming a loss in advertising revenue that, by his own math, means Twitter could be worth just $4 billion, a 90 percent drop in value since he purchased the app. He has attempted to cater to a small faction of political extremists, doling out tens of thousands of dollars to figures such as Andrew Tate, but he has yet to introduce any meaningful features that serve the broader user base. Meanwhile, he’s suggested that he may make the majority of the platform’s users actually pay to use the app, and this week rolled out a confusing new change that ruins how links are displayed.

“You can’t successfully force users to use a platform that’s hostile to them—not in the long run,” James Marshall, a longtime software engineer in Berkeley, California, who has built open-source social-media software, told me. “You may get a short-term gain or think you get a short-term gain, but it’s not going to last. Users will continue to resist, they’ll move to other platforms, and your user base will go away.”

Righting the ship would require Musk to recognize that fixing X is more than a technical task. To win users back, Musk needs to humble himself and empathize with users who won’t pay a monthly fee—not simply attempt to force-feed people content they don’t want to see and features they don’t want to use.

Sadly, such skills are often not valued in today’s Silicon Valley, which rewards a Musk-like approach to fundamentally human problems, Caterina Fake, a long-standing developer of online communities and the host of the podcast Ingenious With Caterina Fake, told me. “You see it again and again with the technologists running the show,” she said. “I actually think that a lot of these social platforms, if they had different leaders, could regain the care and feeding of humanity. I don’t think that it’s a problem in the software itself.”

As other platforms rush to capitalize on X’s failures, they too must learn to listen to and respect their users. If they don’t, X will not be the last failed social platform.

Few Americans are shedding tears for Kevin McCarthy. The former House speaker engendered little public sympathy as he tried, and ultimately failed, to wrangle a narrow and fractured Republican majority into a functioning governing body. His ouster on Tuesday has, in the short term, paralyzed Congress and increased the likelihood of a prolonged government shutdown in the coming weeks.

Republicans are only now beginning to contemplate the significant political ramifications of tossing McCarthy. Retaining their narrow majority in the House next year was already going to be a challenge. But the GOP will now have to defend its four-seat advantage without a leader who, for all of McCarthy’s political shortcomings, was widely recognized as its best fundraiser, candidate recruiter, and campaign strategist. “They just took out our best player,” a rueful Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma told me on Thursday, referring to the eight renegade Republicans who voted to remove McCarthy.

Cole, the chair of the Rules Committee and a 22-year veteran of the House, was a McCarthy loyalist to the end. He could become his successor if neither of the declared GOP candidates, Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Representative Jim Jordan, the Judiciary Committee chair, are able to secure the votes needed to become speaker. Cole has declined offers to run for the job himself—he told me the chances that the gavel lands in his hands are “very low, and if I have anything to say about it, zero”—but as someone with good relationships across the party, he’s seen as a solid backup.

For now, Cole is, like other McCarthy allies, still seething at the unprecedented vote to overthrow the speaker and is backing efforts to change the House rules so that whoever replaces McCarthy does not face the same ever-present threat. “We put sharp knives in the hands of children, and they used them,” Cole said.

[Read: Kevin McCarthy’s brief speakership meets its end]

In an hour-long phone interview, he told me that the hard-liners’ revolt against McCarthy could “very easily” cost the GOP its majority next year. “I think these guys materially hurt our chances to hold the majority,” Cole said. “That’s just the reality.”

McCarthy is neither a policy wonk nor a brilliant legislator. But his strengths  were underappreciated, Cole said. Committees he controlled raised more than half a billion dollars for the House Republican majority in recent years. McCarthy has also played a leading role in persuading promising Republicans to run for pivotal House seats. “This guy was by far the best political speaker that I’ve seen,” he told me. (Democrats and more than a few Republicans would dispute that assertion, pointing to the fact that Republicans won a much slimmer majority under McCarthy’s leadership in 2022 than they were expected to.)

“This is going to cost us candidates,” Cole said, and “God knows how much money.” The spectacle of an internal leadership war bringing the House to a halt also undercuts the GOP’s credibility as a governing party, he lamented. “They just messed up the House. They had no exit plan, no alternative strategy, no alternative candidate.”

Both Jordan and Scalise are more conservative than McCarthy, as is a third potential candidate, Representative Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, who heads the Republican Study Committee, the GOP’s largest bloc of conservative members. None of them, however, can match McCarthy’s fundraising prowess. Cole told me he’s “leaning pretty strongly” toward Scalise, the second-ranking House Republican. Donald Trump has endorsed Jordan, but Scalise is nevertheless considered the favorite to win the party’s nomination for speaker in a secret ballot based on his years in the leadership and because he’s more palatable to Republicans in swing districts. The internal vote, expected next week, will test how much sway the former president has in a leadership battle that typically plays out more in private than in public. (GOP lawmakers reportedly recoiled at plans for Fox News to host a televised debate between the candidates, who normally make their pitches behind closed doors.)

Scalise is well-liked within his party, but he’s undergoing treatment for blood cancer, which Cole acknowledged was a concern for some Republicans. “People are worried,” he said. “They’re worried that we’re going to put him in a job where he hurts himself.” In 2017, Scalise underwent several months of rehab after being shot by a would-be assassin targeting Republican lawmakers at a baseball practice.

Jordan is by far the more bombastic of the two. A former college-wrestling champion, he helped found the House Freedom Caucus and made his name as a conservative foe of former Speaker (and fellow Ohioan) John Boehner. Jordan’s antagonism toward the leadership alienated many rank-and-file Republicans then, but he struck something of a truce with McCarthy, his onetime rival. McCarthy didn’t stand in the way of Jordan’s promotion to become the top Republican on first the House Oversight Committee and then on the Judiciary Committee, a perch from which he’s launched aggressive investigations into President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Jordan returned the favor by backing McCarthy’s bid to become speaker, sticking by him during all 15 rounds of voting in January and during this week’s revolt.

[Peter Wehner: Kevin McCarthy got what he deserved]

Scalise would likely have an easier time than Jordan winning the 218 Republican votes needed to secure the speakership in the public House floor vote. Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who led the effort to topple McCarthy, has said he would support either candidate. Jordan’s close ties to Trump and his disdain for bipartisan compromise could make him a problem for politically vulnerable Republicans, particularly those from New York and California who represent districts that Biden carried in 2020. His nomination would also likely revive questions about his handling of allegations of sexual misconduct against a wrestling-team physician at the Ohio State University when Jordan served as a coach. Jordan has denied wrongdoing, but former student athletes have said he knew about the physician’s abuse and failed to report it.

The scandal could haunt Republicans come election time if Jordan is the speaker, but the issue animating the leadership race is whether to, as Cole put it, “take away the knives” and restrict the procedural tool, known as the “motion to vacate,” that Gaetz used to remove McCarthy. “We’ve driven out three speakers now with this weapon,” Cole said. Boehner resigned in 2015 after it became clear that he might lose the speakership in a floor vote, and his successor, Paul Ryan, was under increasing pressure from his right flank when he chose to retire three years later.

The Main Street Caucus, a coalition of more pragmatic and ideologically flexible Republicans, is pushing to change the rules, and a few members have said they’ll only support a candidate who promises to do so. Currently, any single lawmaker can force a vote on a motion to vacate. To raise that threshold, Republicans might need votes from Democrats, who refused to help rescue McCarthy. “I think it would get a lot of Democratic support,” Cole said. “We’d have to endure another hour of ‘I told you so.’ That’s fair enough.” Though he was critical of Democrats for voting to remove McCarthy, he said he understood why they did. “If we had the opportunity to take out [Nancy] Pelosi,” Cole said, “we probably would have done the same thing.”

He recounted a conversation with a long-serving House Democrat, Representative Bill Pascrell of New Jersey, who alluded to worries that dissident Democrats could use the same tactic to oust a future speaker in their party. “We have our nuts too,” Cole recalled him whispering in an elevator. (Pascrell did not respond to a request for comment.)

The outcome of the rules debate could determine when Republicans are able to elect a speaker, reopen the House, and repair the harm they’ve done to their chances in next year’s elections. For his part, Cole is hoping that whoever they choose can quickly win a majority in a floor vote next week. And if they don’t? “Then,” he said, “it’s really a chaotic situation.”