Re:Why Elon Musk’s Quest to Revive Twitter Is Likely to Fail
by karmakaze on Sunday November 06, 2022 @04:39PM
(#33497542)
I don't know how much Musk is to be trusted. But I did see (I think it was a video interview) where he spoke of Twitter as a public square and it being important that such a thing exist and thrive in contrast to bubbles and echo chambers that don't attempt to distinguish between mainstream viewpoints and extremes. At the time, I accepted that his interest in Twitter wasn't primarily for profit or pushing a specific political agenda. I'll just be waiting and seeing how it plays out.
Further I do think Musk made a calculated move about this “free speech” ploy. Parlor, and whatever the previous app was, show that there is a Market for a platform ran and dominated by more conservative rhetoric.
The issue is
1. Most people aren’t /that/ conservative in general just on 1-2 issues. The far right turns them off and the far right can’t sustain a platform so once the moderates are gone it dies or becomes a cesspool of scams.
2. All conservative platform startups are beholden to Donald Trump. He brings the far rights and ensures they’re loud. Again this turns off the middle of the road guy who are the real market here. Twitter seems like it’s looking to keep the Trump wing silenced while pumping up the more traditional republicans. They have the excuse that he was already banned and its bad for business or any number of other ones.
So I do think that Twitter is in a good position to charge their user base and they will have a legion of people who will pay only because it’s the only option or they hate ad ridden apps. I also think if they do this they can replace Facebook as not just the default “social media app” but a model of how to do web scale applications without ads.
A conservative platform isnt an moonshot, but getting all those people to trust in and engage with a platform while keeping the center and the left is.