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devtesla wrote (edited )

I like to think of two different twitters, the upper case Twitter the company that runs twitter and the lower case twitter that is the actual product.

Uppercase T Twitter is fucked. It's not really about the firings or advertisers leaving, it's that musk bought the company with billions in debt then transferred that debt to Twitter. There's no world where musk cuts costs and increases revenue enough to keep this house of cards up.

Lowercase t twitter has shown itself to be remarkably consistent even as uppercase T Twitter flails. There's a lot of things uppercase T is going to do that will make lowercase t worse: it's going to go down more, it's going to deprioritize accessibility, there's going to be more high profile hacking, there's going to be more spam. I don't think any of that is going to be deadly, though! People still use email even though it has all those problems and more. There's something about the core product that is useful and, more importantly, addictive.

I could be wrong, Musk could truly run it into the ground instead of selling it off. The changes he makes might have more of an effect that I think! But I have a sense that less is going to change, even if blue checks are gone or whatever.

Edit: On verification, I believe it does much less that people think it does. The real problem is less moderation to actually enforce rules against impersonation. It may mean big accounts Post less. But yeah, what keeps people on twitter is less the big accounts and more the general rumbling and gossip so that might be less of a problem that it appears.