As someone who really enjoyed using Twitter to connect with other experts in my field, I’m pretty depressed about it. Somehow Twitter caught lightning in a bottle and became a very useful and important service. Want to try to improve it? No problem: try to improve it! But this isn’t so much an experiment as a child pulling the legs off a bug to see what happens. I can’t see any way the network survives if these plans all go wrong.

I use Twitter daily. A lot. I can understand feeling bad if it falls apart - we will have lost something. I don't understand feeling bad now though, when it hasn't yet fallen apart.

Maybe it'll be okay, maybe it won't, but no company lasts forever. If Twitter dies something else will come along.

There’s an $8/mo plan now, that isn’t required, and a company that was long struggling cut workers.

So what? I fail to see how this so far changes much of how Twitter behaves. This feels like hysteria; what am I missing?

If Twitter remains useful for people who don’t subscribe to the $8 plan then it might be fine. But I recently saw an interview with Musk where he said those users’ tweets would be pushed “way down” in the priority queue, which is an important vote against. Note that even though this came straight from the new owner, one has to keep in mind that Elon Musk says all sorts of random nonsense: so maybe it’s just more bluff and he’ll keep everything stable for those users. On the other hand I think it’s enough of a warning that I’ve started using Mastodon, which turns out to be suddenly full of (infosec) experts and is actually a lot of fun — like Twitter back in 2013.