Well, I think that criticism is valid. The thing is that there is no good alternative. Elon can break a lot of things and people still will be there.

> no good alternative

Depending on how you use Twitter, Mastodon might be a good alternative.

That ship has sailed. In the first few weeks there was lots of buzz about alternatives, PG had a little fit and spent about 15 minutes exclusively on mastadon etc. The buzz is gone now, something big will have to change for it to get it's momentum again.

Mastodon is doing just fine, from what I can tell. I don't know why people keep pushing the narrative that an alternative platform has to capture Twitter's userbase in its entirety or else be considered a failure. Not everything is driven by buzz and hype.

Mastodon is doing great. Just passed 10 million users a while ago and now has a sustained network effect of around 2000 users an hour. Numbers aside the community and experience is awesome. No idea how people still use Twitter.

What specifically is broken? I only use Twitter occasionally but it seems to be working fine.

If you use it occasionally you didn't notice: - not working notifications - broken feeds - random delays in loading the page

We are still in the short term after Musk's acquisition, wait a year/two, if these articles are already circulating now… I don’t see a very bright future for Twitter.

The article's exist because the author's don't like that Elon owns Twitter not because the future isn't very bright for Twitter

Musk himself said that Twitter has lost half of its valuation. Twitter took out a $13B loan to be bought (I still don't how how that's even a thing, but here we are), and now it's worth, what $22B? If this keeps up, the value of the company will be less than its debt to the bank fairly soon. That looks like a nosedive, love or hate musk.

Given the kinds of articles that circulated about Tesla back in 2008 already, they should be bankrupt. Given the news that are circulating every day, we should all be dead.

We laugh about the ancients when they tried to predict the future from the entrails of slaughtered animals. But to try to predict it from news articles on the web…? The entrails reading ancients would be laughing about us!

Twitter has lost half its valuation since Musk bought it.

You don't need internet thinkpieces to divine the direction of that arrow.

The only source for that current valuation is Musk himself, whose source was sticking his finger up his ass and picking a number that sounded low enough to motivate his few remaining employees to make it higher.

You think he bought it as an investment? Because he thought it was undervalued? Like when he started SpaceX because he thought it was the best way to multiply his PayPal money?

It doesn't matter what his plan was. A company that loses half its value in five months is not, in most cases, a company on a path to success.

It's not impossible to turn that around. But odds aren't in favor.

You say Twitter skeptics are just saying what they want to be true. What would you think if someone told you that their favorite social media site had lost half its value in five months but they were sure it was gonna turn around soon? Would that seem likely to someone without an emotional investment?

I think you don’t know what his plan was. And I also disagree with your implicit definition of value.

Like I said, it doesn't matter what his plan was. And I wasn't "implying" anything, I'm explicitly talking about money.

Running a social media site costs. Not even Musk has the liquid capital to keep it afloat as a public service at this loss rate. Either he comes up with a radical new income stream, or he'll have to shut it down or sell it. How virtuous his plans are, how much cultural value Twitter has, these things are irrelevant. A car won't go without gas.

Also, you didn't answer my question.

> A company that loses half its value in five months is not, in most cases, a company on a path to success.

I'd venture that it's probably lost a lot more than half of its brand value as well.

I agree with this assessment. Early on I took these types of articles seriously but at this point I think they're writing what they want to see happen, not what is actually happening.

If people want Twitter to die (note it's 2023 and AOL is still around so it might take a while), something better has to come along.

> If people want Twitter to die (note it's 2023 and AOL is still around so it might take a while)

Like AOL, Twitter will be dead in every way that really matters long before the corporate entity is shut down.

Amusingly enough, AOL owns TechCrunch, although I suspect you knew that...

It's kind of funny how Twitter became what AOL once aspired to be - a walled garden where all that separates you from your destination is a single #keyword.

I think it's a mistake to ignore these articles for two reasons - 1 mechanical, and 1 structural. The mechanical reason - headlines are clickbait, no twitter isn't literally dying today, but read the article and it is making some pretty legitimate points.

The second, more structural reason is a common theme with brand equity, you can do a lot of things over time to damage a brand and non of them invididually will sink your company. But these shots to the company accumulate, and eventually it's gone too far to come back from, you can't recover. To a certain extent you saw this with digg, the redesign was the obvious exodus point, but the trust had been lost far earlier - people were ready to walk away.

In the same way, Twitter doesn't look today like it's collapsing, but it's done a lot of permanent damage to itself. That broad base of quirky and interesting people you used to follow on twitter? They're not there anymore, they don't want to be on that weird homophobic guy's platform. Some of the people have stayed, but those communities largely exist on other platforms now, Twitter is no longer the centre of gravity. But those aren't the thing making twitter a billion dollar platform. The platform is still busy, but it's full of crypto bros and VC influencers, people who will take great pride in telling you how AI is going to make <person with high social status> unemployed. But that's not a healthy ecosystem - those are the guys who move in to try and farm social capital from the high status individuals, but the high status individuals aren't there anymore - a deliberate move from Elon. So yeah, it's still alive, but to some extent the value has already walked out the door. There hasn't been the big bang to crystalize this yet, but it seems highly likely that Twitter has given up its space as a cultural centre-peice. The cool kids have moved on.

Once there's a legitimate mainstream alternative that gathers a user base and is easy to use, Twitter might significantly decrease its userbase. For example, Meta launching its Twitter alternative and acquiring Instagram users onto it.

This argument would make a lot more sense if people actually gave a shit what TechCrunch or CNN had to say. In fact it's the opposite, and you see audiences actively resisting whatever agenda the "mainstream media" transparently broadcasts as its goal, to the point you get people entrenching themselves in contrarian positions they wouldn't even be able to justify if you asked them to.

"This argument would make a lot more sense if people actually gave a shit what TechCrunch or CNN had to say"

The only requirement is a sound argument. The source is an unimportant detail.

This is a very strange conspiratorial kind of ad hominem fallacy that makes no attack on the 'sense' of the argument nor addresses it in any way...

No, the argument I was replying to was basically that the constant disparaging of Twitter in media outlets will be psychological "death by a thousand cuts" to their branding. I'm saying that the result will be the opposite of that, almost like a streisand effect, because in general, people do not trust the media. When the media pushes a story, the natural inclination for many is to dig their heels into a position contrary to the media's agenda they infer from the reporting.

For example, the more CNN reported about COVID and Vaccines, the less likely the already vaccine hesitant were to get one.

Obviously for contentious topics you need to modulate this based on how politicized it is and which media outlet is reporting the negative stories about Twitter, or whichever topic some side has an agenda against. In this case, the people who are fans of Musk are almost exclusively people who oppose the outlets that have been posting negative stories about Twitter.

If Fox News, NYPost, or CoinMarketCap were posting negative stories about Twitter, then GP may have a point - the stories would eventually inflict damage to the brand. But as it stands today, the only outlets crusading against Twitter are the same outlets fervently opposed by most Twitter supporters, so the negative coverage will only make Twitter more endearing to them. Anyone more agreeable to those outlets probably already dislikes Twitter/Musk, so the negative branding effect will be mostly negligible.

Tons of bots.

EDIT: It used to be crypto bots. Now it's mostly american far right (or foreign agents pretending to be american far right) bots. Sorry, no link here, just personal experience.

I’ve seen a huge reduction in bots over the last 2 months. I hardly get tagged by them anymore and I rarely see them in my feed.

Edit: grammar

Are you unpopular? I have around 1k followers and my inbox is constantly filled with spam now.

> Now it's mostly american far right (or foreign agents pretending to be american far right) bots

Is it possible, given the revelations of the Twitter Files, that those viewpoints were (whether bot-originated or not) suppressed until recently?

So let’s say the suppression was mainly aimed at bots. Let’s just say that most bots were right wing, what do you want happening here? Let the site be run by bots?

Obviously I and any other Twitter user would like it to be free of bots.

Not in my feed.

Personally, I've stopped ever using Twitter for more than a couple minutes in an incognito window once or twice a week. My entry point to Twitter was typically links shared on social media, at which point I'd often check up on my follows, scroll the feed etc.

As of sometime recently every time I follow a Twitter link on social media in my regular browsers a warning comes up shaking me down for money to continue using SMS 2FA or disable it altogether, so I just open it in incognito or, better yet, not at all.

I thought 2FA was an entry level account safety requirement these days, but apparently now it's a premium monetized feature! Maybe Tesla can take a cue from this book, and offer curtain airbags only to premium customers.

Right now, it is not possible to like tweets, to view threads, or to view someone’s activity. Most images don’t load.

This is not the news.

The news is that this is not an event deemed significant. This is the norm.