Twitter’s cultural significance is almost net negative. It has been a vehicle for divisiveness and culture wars and not only a vehicle but a self driving one if you catch my drift.

That depends on which aspects of Twitter you focus on. It has added a ton of value for niche interest areas, open source intelligence and reporting, news from underserved areas or issues, and so many others.

The value isn't in the loudest and most active accounts, but the long tail of expertise that was previously either not widely visible or connected in the way Twitter enabled.

All that will be lost.

Agreed, losing InfoSec Twitter will really sting

not sure if incident responders will be cheering or crying for less Friday dumpster fire causing tweets :’)

but yeah it’s going to sting r badly…

I disagree. The internet has increased the reach of individuals by many orders of magnitude: we (humanity) are experiencing the consequences of something we're not equipped for, but that isn't the fault of Twitter or Facebook, it's a consequence of the internet connecting us all.

What, specifically, has Twitter done, that has been a negative influence on the culture? If you look at, say, Donald Trump, he was across the internet being divisive in every venue he could get his hands on, from Facebook to Reddit... and outside of the internet too, on Fox News and the like.

If we went back 2 decades and put all of humanity on a bbs or newsgroup instead, you'd have the same outcome.

Twitter is a cesspool. The three times I've created an account I have deleted it in less than 24 hours because I couldn't figure a way to filter good content from all the noise, toxicity and low quality content. Reddit is not much different but at least you can reduce the scope by staying in small niche subreddits. I'm following this with curiosity to see if all these changes improve the situation or drive Twitter to the ground, but both seem to me like they would be an improvement.

So you're saying you followed some real jerks.

I only tried following a few people that posted programming related stuff, but more then half their posts were completely off-topic, so I had no way to filter all the noise. Everything else Twitter suggested was rubbish.

And extremely biased, like the rest of big tech: https://files.catbox.moe/3mvjhv.jpg

If you're basing part of your comment on this event, it might be worth noting that the article states the layoffs were being mentioned before Musk.

> layoffs were being mentioned before Musk

does that mean anything? (especially "mention" seems to carry no predictive value here.) were layoffs mentioned for years and nothing happened? were they put on hold because the ex-CEO wanted Musk to take the blame?

Sure, but I imagine the pre-Musk layoffs would have been similar to what we're seeing in Twitter's peer companies (~10-15%, generous severance payouts, etc.) as opposed to what's happening now. To throw your hands in the air and claim that layoffs were an inevitability is a weird way to shield a dude that is just being cruel because he thinks he's God.

Musk is capricious, cruel, and clueless in general.

Twitter is a trash heap of the worst kind of snarky/sassy culture.

It's great to see it getting shaken up

Alright folks you heard it here first. jdub has assured us Twitter is going down!

lol, what are you basing this comment on?

I think you are out of touch with how poor Twitter is as a medium currently. Either Musk brings it back to some validity or he puts the final nail in the coffin and creates a space for some new better technology to fill the void (that last bit is a bit sarcastic about the new tech).

> Hopefully it destroys him, too.

Hoping that other people will be destroyed, is pretty dark...