You can see this a lot with companies bought by Private Equity firms. They slash costs and save a lot of short-term costs, and all looks good, but the company is now on a path to death.
> the company is now on a path to death
Probably, but it's going to be a very long tail. Forums do not cost that much to run.
Technically maybe everything works more or less as well as before, after a year.
…but the experience is quite bad now: every other thread is full of crypto and/or onlyfans promoting bots. The algorithm displays a lot of obvious attention grabbing posts which have 300 replies, 10 of which are from humans. There’s a constant stream of bots trying to connect with you via follows or likes.
It’s a mess and a fantastic example of why anonymous and free communication platforms absolutely need professional moderation.
My personal politics better align with based Elon than the previous regime, but let's not pretend there's no moderation happening. It's just different.
This was one thing we had tried on Twitter before Elon, and had found that it is detrimental to the platform and engagement. So, had to roll it back. But now it is a thing again. This drives down the popularity and overall usage of the platform, but some people will still claim it works the same (or even better).
Remember when we were told Elon was going to unleash AI on the bot/spam problem and solve it in a month?
It's worse than it ever was. I hardly ever saw bots or spam. Now I have 100+ spam followers, and on the very rare occasion where I reply to something, it gets 90% spam likes. Ads are also crypto, soft porn games and drop shipping companies.
1. The ones remaining are practically working 24x7 every day for essentially the same pay, with the promise of more.
2. You keep falling behind on all the things you need to do to keep things alive and compliant. This eventually comes back in the form of outages or worse, FTC fines.
3. There is very little room for forward looking work, which means you are sacrificing opportunities for growth. E.g.
> 325 million active users in 2015 and it's still about 300 million active users today
These were two very different numbers. The numbers in 2015 were DAUs and the numbers today are mDAU. mDAU are in layman terms users that can be monetized. This number was ~180M in 2018, so the growth was there. Part of the reason why the ad revenue was growing for Twitter during that phase.
4. Safety and Trust on the platform drops quite a bit when you are understaffed. Regardless of your political beliefs or whether you're team Elon, when there are 10 people banning CP instead of 100, there is no way you could argue objectively that the platform stays the same.
There's plenty of other problems, but you would not know they exist unless you're one of the people left after the figurative massacre.
Having 5000 engineers on tap for... potential user growth? Makes sense if you're planning on user growth, but Twitter is kind of the poster child of "we don't need engineers for anticipated growth" given a near-decade of totally flat userbase number.