Driving away lucrative advertising, replacing with much less sustainable premium subscriptions. Then there's cutting the moderation and safety teams to the bone.

I thought everybody hates advertising, no? Let's do a thought experiment and imagine Elon brought more advertising on Twitter. Everyone would bullshit on him for that. In reality, we have the opposite situation. There is less advertising. On top of that, ad revenue is now being shared with creators. What's bad about it?

This is kind of a selling point to me, I can’t use Facebook any more because the obscene number of ads.

My day job is helping sell ad-free, subscriptions, so I'm a fan of the idea. That said, Elon is driving away the lucrative advertisers and not dropping ads entirely. Even Blue subscribers still get ads, albeit fewer.

At their scale and in their market the premium subscriptions model doesn't appear to work, unless their costs can be reduced much, much further.

Sharing revenue with creators is great. Not everything being done is bad. On the whole it just doesn't seem sustainable and sometimes even petty and foolish. Almost appears as if he's trying to bankrupt the company.

The Twitter acquisition happened 7 months ago, on October 27, 2022 to be precise. 7 months is effectively 3 quarters. Let's take "Elon Musk" name out of the equation for a moment. How much do you think is possible to do with one of the largest social network companies in the world within 3 quarters? I work at AWS and I must say everything is really slow here.

What I'm trying to say is it seems like the world is "demanding" too much from Elon. Additionally, there is a weird trend of people rooting for his failure. This is something I strongly stand against.

Why should we be rooting for his success?

Why would I want to live in a world where "a superapp" is needed?

Why would I want to live in a world where you have one company in control of the "town square"?

Personally, I just wanted Twitter to fail because I think that any ad-funded business is bad for us. But if you tell me that Elon's long term game is to make it something even more dystopian than it ever was, then yes I will do everything in my power to see him fail and fail catastrophically.

> Why should we be rooting for his success?

Rooting for someone's success is not about personal preferences or endorsing their actions. It's about fostering a positive and supportive environment that encourages growth and achievement.

> Why would I want to live in a world where "a superapp" is needed?

Super-apps already exist in other markets. Entrepreneurs want to create ones in the US market to foster the diversity of options. This is a healthy process. You live in the world with wars, but you want to do everything in your power to see Twitter fail. That's strange. A world catered only to your preferences is unlikely, so you have to be realistic.

> Why would I want to live in a world where you have one company in control of the "town square"?

I don't know. You don't have to live in that town.

> Personally, I just wanted Twitter to fail because I think that any ad-funded business is bad for us.

Pretty much every business in the world is driven by ads, one way or another. However, as I said, Musk doesn't care about ads. In fact, he wants even fewer ads on Twitter. That being said, his goals kinda align with what you want.

> It's about fostering a positive and supportive environment that encourages growth and achievement.

Not when this "growth" and "achievement" is something that affects part of the society negatively, or when there might be unknown consequences.

> Super-apps already exist in other markets.

And they are enablers of authoritarian states and continuous centralized power over a handful of corporations.

> You don't have to live in that town.

Just on another thread I was being accused of being "socially inept" for refusing to use WhatsApp.

If we live in a world where so much power is centralized into a few corporations, they affect everyone's lives, even if they don't participate directly on it.

> Pretty much every business in the world is driven by ads

Does it help you sleep at night to be telling yourself this kind of bullshit, or are you just apathetic?

> he wants even fewer ads on Twitter.

You forgot to capitalize your Lord's name.

> You forgot to capitalize your Lord's name.

Emotions are the enemy of a constructive dialogue. I bail.

> It's about fostering a positive and supportive environment that encourages growth and achievement.

That honestly sounds more like the goal for an elementary school class than the goal for an adult society.

We don't necessarily need to support and encourage development that we don't agree worth, or even see as dangerous. And the idea that growth and achievement are always good things and should be wholly supported and encouraged sounds lovely on the surface, but there are plenty of things that could be considered achievement that we are better off without.

>What I'm trying to say is it seems like the world is "demanding" too much from Elon.

Like, common he set expectations by himself. He was the one bragging and running his mouth how everyone before him was an idiot while he is going to clean and fix the place.

> Additionally, there is a weird trend of people rooting for his failure. This is something I strongly stand against.

I really really hope for failure of his, quite apparent, political project.

Also, Paul, if you think Elon is doing something completely wrong, I encourage you to jump on Twitter Spaces and explain your concerns directly to him. He is live from time to time and happily chimes into a conversation with mere mortals.

> There is less advertising.

There's way more ads. Now every blue checkmark tweet is an ad, paid for placement. So I click on a tweet and all I get are pages of ads with the real tweets buried at the bottom.

Ads aside, there are host of other ways he's ruined twitter from censorship to blocking anon access to amplifying his own terrible tweets.

Why does a social media site need to enforce "safety?" What is "safety" anyway?

It's not "opinions I disagree with," I hope. Because labeling that "unsafe" is a new level of Orwellian.

Its a Facebook narrative to get you to use Threads. Twitter is doing just fine.

One thing he has done is push the paid replies to the top of every tweet. So now every tweet is full of low quality replies at the top and you have to scroll to find the higher quality ones below.

I don't personally agree with your observation, but setting that aside, would you consider that (pushing the paid replies to the top) the definition of "killing" Twitter?

I actually think it might. My experience is that the people who pay to get their replies to the top do it either because they have something to sell, or because they agree with Elon's politics. So the result is that every tweet I view have pretty much the same low quality answers on the top. That has made the experience much worse for me, and I personally would quit if there were a good enough alternative.

It also depends on how you define "killed". I dont think twitter will be gone, but there is a chance it will become a lot more similar to truth social or parler.

Do you think Hackernews would do better or worse if they introduced a paid tier that put your comment above others every time?

> Do you think Hackernews would do better or worse if they introduced a paid tier that put your comment above others every time?

If a paid tier alone puts your comment above others, then the result is negative. However, I do not believe Twitter's algorithm simply ranks by the presence of a blue checkmark. It is a signal amongst other signals and not a sole criteria. My feed has improved after all the changes, which is why I could not share your observation.

Truth social exists because of a censorship. The idea of a social network with high censorship results in a state of content being a walled garden. While the intention behind censorship may be to create a safer and more controlled environment, it often comes at the cost of limiting diversity of thought, stifling creativity, and hindering the progress of society.

Censorship, when implemented excessively, can lead to a state where only certain viewpoints and information are allowed, effectively creating an echo chamber that reinforces existing beliefs and discourages critical thinking.

Twitter has the potential to become the next Truth Social. If Meta enforces excessive censorship in Threads, people might perceive it as a more "positive" social network, offering the illusion of a better alternative. With media support, people could gradually migrate towards Threads, leaving Twitter in decline. However, if Elon achieves his super-app goal, Twitter's current form will no longer exist, rendering these social media-related issues irrelevant. Consequently, Twitter and Threads would evolve into a completely distinct applications.

Truth social exists to spread propaganda from china and russia.

I'm not saying or asking what Truth social is doing today (this is subjective), I'm explaining what was the driving force to create Truth social in the first place.

Yeah, it definitely is. It changes the usage patterns and quite a lot of what was interesting is gone.

The only good thing about it is that I spend more time reading books now.

It might depend on who you follow. For the small number of people I follow who also have a small number of followers, it means that people who are more invested in Twitter show up at the top of the replies. So it hasn't made it any worse...if anything it is better. However, I could see that happening more if you are following people with millions of followers. (Though their replies have always been a mess.)

Everywhere online is pronouncing twitter dead, but I agree. As a user, it seems more alive and vibrant than ever.

Its becoming a far right cesspool. And its making even less money than the little that it did before. Most people i know don't use it anymore.

Due to an excessive censorship prior to the acquisition, Twitter was a far left cesspool. All these users are still active after the acquisition, however many right-wing accounts were reinstated. Consequently, from the political perspective, Twitter is now more balanced than ever. One can be sure of this by tuning their feed – follow a politically diverse groups of people.

> Most people i know don't use it anymore.

Twitter hasn't really changed much. If you know people who no longer want to use the platform, then their decision is likely driven by the propaganda. In a way, it's not their personal decision, but the result of influence from elsewhere.

This is a lie. Not even manipulation or twisting the truth, but clear unambiguous lie. If anything, after Musk takeover, it became clear how good decisions twitter made before.

In addition, Must is not even trying to stand up to regimes and such. It became completely meek.

Also, twitter is not "balanced". It is right-wing in the sense of "we use right-wing as euphemism for nazi and such".

Federal ruling concluded that there was censorship prior to the Musk take over. This is not a theory, this is a fact. Stop spreading nonsense.

If anything, it's just become more centered, now that people aren't getting banned for not conforming to the political whims of the flow of information.

Not sure why you're downvoted, as your observations are completely correct. In fact, there's so much more activity that they've been trying different ways to keep the UX efficient and stable. But, of course, some of the things they've tried haven't worked out so well, so people just like to cherrypick those to make incorrect arguments against Twitters newfound viablity.

Some differences that I've noticed:

1) fake/shell drop shipping companies dominate the ads with nonsense names and computer generated logos. An endless stream of low quality ads as opposed to real companies that used to advertise there.

2) Low effort facebook style posts have began to dominate any reply section, as users who typically had bad posts that saw no engagement, now pay to force people to look at their low effort/hateful/uneducated opinions. (still not gaining many followers but users are now forced to see it over higher quality users).

3) Bot issues are still very much there, every time I make a post with more than a dozen likes, I get 2-3 bot follows that are always a vaguely feminine name and a single post, following hundreds of accounts.

4) API cost increases have hurt positive bot accounts(ie OpossumEveryHour, various "every lot in x" accounts) while tons of crypto scam accounts, tshirt bots, etc have taken over.

5) The general changes to the checkmark system has destroyed the meaning behind the check, it used to serve to ensure accounts were not imposters. Now its simply every guy who watches self help entrepreneur videos has a check.

Just a handful of aspects of the overall degraded experience. Every day the site becomes more hateful and zenophobic, looking more and more like low effort boomer facebook groups every day. Regardless of opinion, the site used to be a place that you could get news from verified sources, follow public figures, and not be inundated literal Nazis. If you own a bar and a couple Nazis are made to feel welcome, you now have a Nazi bar.

> If anything there’s slightly more activity

Only from bots. I mean, this is not even disputable, saying that twitter has more genuine activity now or somehow better content is in the reals of fan fiction.