It also wasn’t really successful before he came in either. It rarely was profitable and usually operated at a loss.
I mean Musk has seemingly made every bad move imaginable, I can only imagine the ideas he’s been talked out of.
i was no fan of twitter, but it was on a path to achieve some financial stability. It had plenty of value as a mechanism to distribute emergency (or other) information quickly. was and had being the operative words here.
Yes, I agree. Investors want explosive exponential growth but there is great value in stable, slightly profitable companies that produce social goods. For example,.Twitter was unique in getting emergency information out; in real.time reporting; in sending out traffic and commuting alerts; in directly and quickly communicating issues with private companies.
Twitter’s success wasn’t monetary. The success came in allowing ordinary people their soapbox at a global town square.
Look at what happened to the price of insulin with a single tweet made back when all the blue checks were in complete free-for-all. A single tweet, made by a random person, thoroughly changed the shape of that one industry. Twitter gave “power” to the people, and those like Musk weren’t comfortable with that.
Ugh. This “global town square” nonsense needs to die.
Twitter’s business was selling ads. They don’t give a flying festerooni about fostering a healthy public discourse. Nearly every part of the technical and UX design was actively hostile to “the people” being able to express themselves in a meaningful way— The entire premise was a character limit that while fun also made it literally impossible to provide meaningful context or nuance to anything, and whether you were just scrolling or trying to reply to people, you never got to see anybody else’s honest opinions either but instead you were fed a carefully algorithmically curated drip of out-of-context ragebait and feelgood fuzzies designed only to keep you stimulated enough to keep on scrolling so they could report a higher number to investors in their next quarterly report and sell you to more ads.
The entire place was always an artificial environment designed to prey on and monetize your attention span; Unless you were replying to somebody you knew, it was never a place for any kind of authentic interaction, much less some kind of grandiose “global town square” that “gave power to the people”.
Twitter may have given certain individuals the tools at some points to trigger positive change. The insulin example was probably the best-case-possible outcome from Musk’s fumbling of the verification system, but it was an accident. And in the meantime, when Twitter does get used deliberately, it has spawned a terrorist group that has murdered and enslaved thousands of people, turbocharged the decline of the most powerful and wealthiest country in the world towards either autocratization or polarized paralysis, and fueled many, many actual full-blown civil wars. (This is what happens when your revolution isn’t built on solid foundations.) Plus, you know, all the harassment, stalking, rape and death threats, political interference, privacy concerns, mental health effects, and actual bots used by malicious actors (which reputable sources tend to estimate at tens of millions in number).
Twitter’s a corporation. They never cared about being a “town square”, only about being seen as such by users so they could line their own pockets. And Elon Musk is just an idiot. He’s not some scheming genius (though he clearly tries to be); he’s the same as any rich idiot discovering the hard way that no amount of ego will make up indefinitely for lack of competence.
It’s just the way they are, no silly conspiracies or battle between good and evil required. Twitter’s amoral, rather than immoral, and Musk is immoral, but it’s in a flailing self-destructive way rather than a conniving Machiavellian way. They’re acting out their nature, and we get caught up in it.
How many actual terrorist groups were we going to let this corporation create in their pursuit for profit before finally admitting that maybe the entire idea was bad from the start? Currently, the immoral idiot is destroying both his own credibility and also the amoral corporation for us all, and really, this is probably almost the best possible outcome.
It was losing money, but not much. They could have made some minor changes to make it profitable. However ~8000 people were making good salaries working for them, and tens of thousands of people and businesses benefited from the platform. Now it’s much smaller, less useful, and still not profitable.
