Musk appears to be doing everything he can to undermine the reputation that Twitter has built up and it is hard to work out why he spent $44 billion on it.
From mass layoffs to treating staff badly to a strangely high number of missteps in a very short space of time. Paying for a blue tick was removed because the obvious happened, letting too many employees go was somewhat reversed because, surprise, the people were actually needed to keep Twitter running and all of this is adding up to advertisers running away at an uncomfortably quick pace.
What all of this has done, however, is make people like me not take Twitter for granted anymore. It made me realise that I use Twitter more than all of the other services put together, possibly more than the web, and that it has become a place I go to multiple times a day for news, laughs and so much more.
You can build Twitter to be ‘your’ social network because you get to control who you follow and who is following you. If the wrong people get involved in your life you can quickly deal with them or you should be able to. There are the obvious pitfalls with trolls and so many other people who cannot deal with people socially in any environment, but it has been a positive place online to be. At least that has been my experience.
Musk had some weird notion of free speech without considering the impacts of unfettered utterance on such a huge network. He believed that he could ride in on an electric-powered horse and suddenly make Twitter build profitability and, well, he fucked up didn’t he.
He has no clue how to manage a social network and he should have been advised of this way before he got to purchase Twitter. He can’t even manage his own Twitter account without screwing up regularly so why should any of the past few weeks have been a surprise.
What is surprising is that one man has the power to buy such a large social network and screw it up so spectacularly and so publicly while we all watch.
I for one will stay with Twitter until, and if, it finally dies and mainly because the competition is not exactly competitive. Mastodon is touted as the main competitor, but I don’t believe it will continue to fly. 99% of people do not want to deal with servers or anything technical and a big social network needs 50% of those 99% to have the power it needs. And the others I have tried so far just don’t come close.
It really does make me appreciate Twitter for what it is today and for what it it has been over the past 15 years, and 17,200 tweets, for me.
Categories: Articles
McGST 
A lot of my online left-leaning friends seem to be more pessimistic than I am about Twitter’s basic survival (the assumption being in that in a system as old and crufty as Twitter, you can’t just lose so many IT folks without stumbling into ‘no one here knows how to fix this one situation’) and their sorrow in the risk of losing it (and many of them rely on it for news etc in a way I never have) seems to be more than countered in the hope of seeing Elon Musk and the techbro culture he represents beefing it.
I think there are two underlying motivations for Musk:
* as he stumbles through middle age he has drank too deeply of the mythos of himself as a Tony Stark-ish genius, even though he’s bought a lot more than he’s actually innovated. Like Trump, he just loves being the center of attention.
* there’s a perception in the right-leaning techbro culture that Twitter is too SJW-leaning – and that blue checks were elitist halos. His revamp of what the checks meant was designed to be both an egalitarian leveler, and I suspect an anti-bot signaler. (I guess the idea that, like emails spam, twitter Bots mostly work because the service is free?) But muddling “this person is important and who they seem to be” with “this person likes twitter enough to pay for it” is poison for what Musk says is one of the critical goals of twitter, to be the most reliable, fast-breaking news sources. Without that trust, all you have is “fast-breaking”.
I suspect he also doesn’t understand the communities that have thrived under twitter that he’s not a part of – sports twitter, Black twitter, etc.
Every social media platform has its own vibe. FB is based on people you know IRL (and then they chased the money to make it the base for all the political horeshit) TikTok is being entertaining in video form, and a million people trying to get famous. Twitter was about the beauty of the bon mot, and offered the chance to be interact with famous people (as well as communicate with representatives from businesses in a public forum, which was kind of nice.)
Personally I dig tumblr – it’s got a different cultural vibe, a really thoughtful way of threading responses, and is a nice blend of text and images (where as twitter is primarily text)
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Also – like the “free speech absolutist” thing… it’s interesting that it doesn’t apply to Alex Jones. (Nor should it) But like, if you say “if it’s legal to say you should be able to say it here” doesn’t cover outting gay kids in like saudi arabia. It’s a moral trash view. (daring fireball’s recent “talk show” w/ Anil Dash covers this whole topic pretty well and has informed some of my views,)
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