Yep, it’s too big to fail.
Twitter not failing gives me no hope for America. We can’t punish anyone anymore.
I think the last hope is that the debt is too much and they can’t generate enough revenue. It seems that would take a while to play out. But I agree that at this point, the folks who’ve left Twitter have left, and it wasn’t enough to kill it.
I think these are good moves. People complained about bots on twitter. This will reduce the number of bots and sock puppet accounts. Yes some will still pay. But is it worth busting out your credit card to boost your mean tweets?
Twitter needs less random assholes spewing their opinions and the world acting like those opinions are important or relevant.
You know who will pay? Actual scammers.
I mean, all it’s going to do is guarantee that the platform is dominated by bots and scam accounts that make enough money to pay for Verified. And indeed it’s going to give those profitable accounts a layer of protection, because now people will be whispering in Musk’s ear, “Sure, you could ban those accounts. But at least they provide revenue. Why not ban that starving artist, political activist, or student tinkerer using instead? We don’t make a dime from them.”
… And people are going to bust out their credit cards to spread sweetness and light? In 2023, does that seem like the more likely scenario?
But it’s not going to be either the mean or the sweet who dominate the new landscape. It’s gonna be crypto pump-and-dumpers (which Musk does not consider spam, remember,) MLMs, Trump University, cheap wish.com crap, etc. etc.
It was always going to take a while to play out. First, it’s only been a bit more than 90 days since Musk took over, which in the real world is nothing. Second, there’s no good reason for people to instantly flee Twitter when it’s still mostly free and still mostly works: it’s hard to wean people off of a free thing they’re used to. More wheels need to fall off and more people need to be squeezed for money to get more people to leave … but don’t worry, it’s clear both of those are coming.
The thing that is going to (slowly) kill Twitter is the fact that it never made money and Musk hasn’t a clue about to make any in social media. It was slowly dripping losses before, and all indications (like the fact Musk isn’t paying his rent, or that ad revenue was down 70% in December) are that it’s now gushing red ink like a trauma victim. Of course, Musk can simply dip into his massive fortune to subsidize Twitter as essentially the Elon Musk Fan Club. But at some point he’ll get tired of losing tens of billions of dollars each year just to have catturd passive-agressively boss him around. Eventually … say in three to five years … he’ll either close it down, or turn it over to his Saudi investors to use as a propaganda outlet.
How is this different from any other social network? These people can buy ads on google and youtube, boost their presence on facebook, all by paying. So now they can pay twitter to do the same thing?
There’s a solution. Stop using Twitter. You won’t miss it, I promise.
There were two hopes for a quick death: mass exodus because Elon is gross (to put it lightly), and technical collapse from the absurd staff reductions immediately after acquisition. It seems obvious now that neither has happened, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that those were always impossible. But I do hope that the third option (running out of money) does come to pass.
Accessibility suffers with this change.
Enshittification will continue until revenue improves.
Also, my autocorrect suggested “enshittification” as the autocomplete. That was awesome.
Can the bots not just do the same thing by running a script on the website?
I bet you could write Selenium scripts to post to Twitter if you were really dedicated to your funny bot.
Yeah they could scrape, but that’s a lot more resource intensive, legally a bit more dubious, and really hard to maintain. Twitter could start introducing minor website changes that most customers wouldn’t notice or care about but confused bots.
At the end of the day a service like Twitter can make life hell for third party integrators if they want them gone, so trying to work around Twitter removing the free APIs is probably a non-starter.
Wait does this API nonsense mean we’re gonna lose the Red Panda Every Hour bot?!?!?!
I think posts like that one highlight one key to understanding Musk. He is in this because he desperately needs to live out his fantasy of being able to pretty much do anything he wants. He’s the kid who never outgrew the thought that one day he’d be able to go into the candy store and get anything he wanted, and make the other kids beg him if they wanted theirs.
And the Azumanga Daoh Picture Bot T_T
Nooooooooooooo!
I have that book. Funny shit.