* * *

Some spoke out. But many were in the sickos-yes-yes.png camp of being absolutely gleeful. And a much larger number were indifferent or in the wait-and-see camp.

ITT comparing 3rd party api limits to nazi germany

what does the International Telephone & Telegraph company have to do with this thread?

In This Thread.

Twitter needs more lebensraum for its own APIs.

That was a good one

The damage to Twitter has been devastating to the org, but I'm sort of interested to see Elon run Twitter by himself. Like a musical busker playing all of the instruments at once. Maybe a bit of The IT Crowd "reality imitating art" [1] with Twitter running off a box on his bookshelf somewhere as nostalgia after most participants have vacated.

"Whats the box with the flashing lights?" "Oh, that's what's left of Twitter."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg

I agree that people have held out way too long. My more nihilistic interpretation is that taking any of Twitter's functionality for granted was a mistake. It's a publicly traded business, and if you didn't want big money to ruin the experience, you shouldn't have put faith in money in the first place.

YouTube is on a similar precipice. People think it's irreplaceable because YouTube displaces every competitor. In truth, Google has simply monetized the distribution of video content so well that nobody else has a reason to compete. Streaming video on a competing platform is almost always a shitshow. But, eventually YouTube will fail or implement a heartbreaking change that forces everyone off. Maybe Larry Ellison will make a bid for it, and we'll complete the Lex Luthor arc for American billionaires. Either way, it's another "too big to fail" service that is sure to fall apart at some point.

If you want to avoid situations like this, take ownership of the media you like and don't let your voice rely on other people's platforms.

Honestly, it was partly my faith in money that made me comfortable with Twitter as a public company. They (gradually and often reluctantly) learned that if they wanted to be a viable business, they had to provide a reasonably safe place for a lot of people. For purely pecuniary reasons, they also thought they needed to be a good partner to people building things related to Twitter.

All that has gone by the wayside, of course. Part of the problem here is that Musk had so much money he could afford to burn tens of billions of dollars on a weird personal fixation. [1] A problem that the market has happily started to correct, [2] but perhaps not soon enough to save Twitter.

[1] One possible explanation is here: https://defector.com/i-was-almost-elon-musks-twitter-voice

[2] He even set a record! https://www.npr.org/2023/01/12/1148634966/elon-musk-guinness...

They didn't learn much of anything, though. Twitter lost money when they played nice, and they lose less money when they play mean and lean. Either way Twitter was bloated and overvalued, but anything bought with wealth leveraged against Tesla shares can't be worth much in the first place.

No, they really did learn things. For example, consider the racist mobbing of Leslie Jones in 2016: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/jul/18/leslie-jones...

Twitter learned that they really had to take harm reduction more seriously if they didn't want to be known for things like that. I believe that their improvements there were part of what set them on the path to their later profits: https://www.netcials.com/financial-net-profit-year-quarter-u...

And as far as losing money goes, their "lean and mean" approach isn't doing so well. Ad revenues are reportedly down ~40% as the same time Musk is going to have to come up with billion-dollar interest payments.

Ad revenue can be down 40% if your overall paid workforce was reduced by ~85%. It wasn't working out for Twitter either way, if they wanted to be profitable then something had to change.

As an impartial non-Twitter user, I think it's safe to say that neither version of Twitter was healthy for it's platform or users.

Twitter has been profitable in the recent past and could be again. Drama was not necessary.

I think your claim on profitability is flat out wrong. If you think that's the case, what are the exact numbers you are imagining that would make Twitter profitable?

Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019. Down in 2020, and 2021 is hard to fairly assess.

This feels like the same thing with Gawker and the HBO show Silicon Valley.

It feels like people with money are shutting down, neutering, avenues where they receive criticism.

Since much of the money for the buyout came from the Saudis and the Chinese, it feels like the people behind this are more concerned with subduing Twitter than turning a profit. Maybe why they had to make it private, it’s illegal to run a public company into the ground.

Agree 100%

Elon has always slashed customer service and PR in the companies he runs.

Twitter for all it's warts, was still a haven for public accountability when traditional customer service avenues fell short.

Not surprising that following an unprecedented consolidation of wealth (2020), we see someone take that opportunity to dismantle that.

Social media has been the driver of an enormous level of democratic empowerment, an unprecedented new degree of bottom-up communication. I think society hasn't experienced such a structural shift to political power distribution since the printing press's arrival in the West. Unlike China, the West had no central authority, so what was printed and distributed could not be properly suppressed.

The counter-reaction to this, I believe, is the increased concentration of wealth and push toward monopoly and control.

If democracy prevails, I believe social media, like Youtube, Reddit etc will drive a level of cultural, scientific and technological enlightenment to equal the Renaissance.

If autocracy prevails, if the whole world falls under the dominion of a single authority, we will all end up in one single shithole country.

>Since much of the money for the buyout came from the Saudis and the Chinese,

ooooo, I like the dark place you're taking this. I didn't give one iota about Twitter before the Musk debacle, but I have been enjoying the shit show since it started. I can't stop paying attention into just how much of a future Business 101 case study this will become. I remember when everyone said how Reed Hasting navigated the Netflix debacle of trying to separate the DVD side of the business as a future case study. I feel like Musk saw that and said, "hold my beer! I'll show you how to ruin a company's brand!!!"

What happened to Silicon Valley that was in the same vein as Gawker’s destruction?