Yep totally. Kind of like the "broken window" phenomena with a building/neighborhood where if one broken thing doesn't get fixed everything else goes pretty quickly

It’s a hypothesis, not a phenomenon. Several studies and statistical analyses shown that regression to the mean and external factors were better explanations for the decrease in crime than the zero-tolerance policy. The theory itself is based on a presumed correlation with no real proof of causality.

I guess a counterpoint would be freenode, but maybe that isn't large enough to count.

Structurally, from a people perspective, complicated but it’s not really systems complicated. IRC is simple, as is the software Freenode was built on.

The featureset of Freenode, compared to the featureset of Twitter, the company is a couple of orders of magnitude off.

>I'm not focusing on a single "hitman" taking down Rome. Who really knows but it was a multitude of factors. My point here is that large systems don't typically acutely fail. It's more of a gradual process of rust and decay that accelerates them into irrelevance.

I think a lot of people with experience understood this fundamental concept but the issue is that it seems difficult to convey this into a headline grabbing series of news articles.

Therefore, it seems as if the whole hubub at the beginning of this saga was this concept but massively overinflated(OMG twitter is going to collapse overnight). In fact I guess you can argue that it was so overinflated that it was lying but thats the standard we have to live with for now.

> It's more of a gradual process of rust and decay that accelerates them into irrelevance.

precisely. entropy tends to increase in this universe. humans are special because our phenotypical effect of creating order is unparalleled in scale, precision, and sophistication.

The funniest thing to me is how the Billionaire railed about a lack of free speech, but then tried to turn free speech into a commodity that could be purchased for his own opportunistic profit.

Every day is a day closer to when Twitter will vanish, curing public addiction to and dependency upon it. Something else will come later, and slowly be corrupted again as well.

It would have been easier and much less costly to just have made an app from scratch and to have left Twitter to it's prior dysfunctional obscurity.