It's sad to see such a great platform circling the tubes, but I think the occasional death of a large social network is a net positive benefit for the world.
The shitty thing here is that it didn't "have to" die. It simply should not be possible for a single powerful individual to destroy something used by millions because they don't like the way it is used.
The ascendance of Threads show how Bluesky and Mastodon basically fumbled the bag while the end-zone was wide open. A moderately decent experience was all that was needed. Threads isn't even that good, it's just better than Mastodon and actually publicly accessible unlike Bluesky.
A shame, I was ride-or-die for Mastodon. But its bad onboarding, bad discovery, and various UI hiccups killed it.
I think the jury is out on whether it is really "ascending." Getting a few hundred million out of billions of installed users try out a new extension doesn't mean much. What would be impressive if they can sustain the engagement, and we won't that for some time.
Scaling is hard. What Meta did with 100 million users off the bat and basically no downtime or issues (Instagram had problems intermittently, but now fixed I believe), is not something Bluesky can do.
So they'll likely be conservative.
Also if they open, it won't be exactly now, because they're waiting for the hype around Threads to die a bit and people to start saying "Threads sucks I uninstalled it" and so on. Which some people will inevitably do, no matter if Threads is successful or not.
This is the ideal scenario, where if we'll be getting fragmentation due to Twitter outflow, at least it leads to specialization for different optimal scenarios.
Human identity is important in order to reduce astroturfing which has reached critical proportions and is literally defining and destroying businesses, political regimes and so on. So the interest in abusing anonymous accounts, fake accounts, AI accounts, is great.
But anon accounts are also needed. Having distinct platforms, one that focuses on human identity and decency, corporate cleanliness & user friendliness, and one that focuses on anonymous accounts, decentralization, power users, but may also come with trolls, abuse, scams... seems like a nice duo.
Can Bluesky do it for 100K users though? Because that would still be a good start. And if they can't then they need to rethink their engineering strategy.
My current favorite conspiracy theory is that Musk is deliberately killing Twitter, having been funded to do so.
Who paid for Twitter's acquisition? Musk, big banks, a Saudi prince, and Larry Ellison (read: biiig money).
What has Twitter been known for spurring and amplifying the last 15 years? OWS, Arab Spring, MeToo, and BLM.
Basically every move Musk has made can be read as a move to destroy Twitter while maintaining deniability - firing the workers, not paying bills, running afoul of employment legislation, high-profile idiotic moves, petty attacks on detractors, etc.
Killing even one new OWS movement could pay off in the billions for these people.
Well, if I were going to pull off a plan like this, I might fake a fight with a 'rival' social network ,while actually having some kind of deal with them. It's magic 101 - look at my hands. Don't look over there.
Consider that maybe the literal dick measuring, the called-off MMA fight, etc, is just kayfabe - a show. It wouldn't be the first time.
We fall for controlled opposition a lot more than we realize, because it's effective, and basically impossible to prove.
Sometimes, the rivalry is 'real', but helps both parties maintain a profitable status quo. Pepsi vs Coke, Dems vs Republicans, etc.
Even if it isn't a wrestling show, *Zuck and Musk's interests align*. Their incentives are aligned far, far more than with any non-billionaires. Be certain of that, and know that they know this. Their bluster and meme-battles don't amount to much more that a show in any case.
For whatever reason - Musk could hardly be more effective in killing Twitter than he has been so far, while maintaining plausible deniability. This invites fun speculation.
What's not speculation is that we're absolutely daft for letting these ultra-billionaires run our social media. It's deeply unsettling that people tolerate this after the last couple decades, and even cheer for new, even more insidious offerings from the same exact people.
Wouldn't Elon Musk have to be getting something in return for the price of his reputation among the industry and investors by choosing to waste money on Twitter?
You're assuming that Musk actually wanted to buy Twitter, and not the fact that he just bullied people into thinking he'd buy Twitter then mistakenly signed an ironclad contract to buy Twitter as part of that bullying, then tries to escape the contract for 6 months before the courts told him he had to uphold his end of the contract.
dragontamer, I'm not sure if you are replying to mandmandam or to me, but I will provide a response from the standpoint that the reply was intended for my message.
Musk may have not intended to purchase Twitter, but now he has it and it's costing him a massive amount of money. Losing more money by making it fail seems counterintuitive to the process of getting a return on an investment. The user mandmandam seems to be implying that Musk has been paid by Saudi oligarchs to make Twitter fail due to its history in causing disruption to their plans, but that seems to hinge on Musk's investment in the company, his personal reputation being deeply damaged, his stakes in existing companies becoming risky, and his future investments being tarnished, all being outweighed by whatever nefarious individuals are paying him. I think that because of how much he has personally lost in this Twitter fiasco that he would have to be receiving a huge payout for destroying Twitter. Therefore, I assume that no matter his intentions surrounding the purchase of Twitter, he is not malicious in his destruction of it but rather inept at running the company anywhere near the level of success it was experiencing before his purchase.
> The user mandmandam seems to be implying that Musk has been paid by Saudi oligarchs to make Twitter fail due to its history in causing disruption to their plans, but that seems to hinge on Musk's investment in the company
No. It just means that the Saudis think that Musk is a useful idiot.
Saudis can be trying to destroy Twitter and Musk can be trying to save it at the same time. Alas, this is how Musk thinks he's saving it. He's heavy handed, narcissistic and ignorant in the ways of online culture.
It certainly could be the truth, but I’m not convinced. An outside agent wanting to destroy dissidence by massively overpaying for Twitter and then running it into the ground seems like it would be inviting a replacement. Wouldn’t it be better to buy it and run it efficiently?
We don't know for sure what he did or didn't get. It could be something tangible, or intangible, or both - how would we know?
Who knows how much tax Musk saved the .01% over the next ten years by crushing Twitter? It could literally be trillions. Handy crowd to owe you a favour.
Billionaires have class consciousness, while most commenters here and elsewhere really don't. We all have more in common with the average homeless person than with Musk. The difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is about a billion dollars. And Musk is a billionaire hundreds of times over.
So, assuming that he cares too much about his reputation or a small fraction of his money (again, he didn't even buy it with only his own money) to ever intentionally harm Twitter would be a mistake.
Like I said, even if it helps prevent discussion of a wealth tax it could be worth the spend over the long run - though I'd bet there's more to it. It's a little too clumsy and obvious how he keeps trying to destroy the site while pretending to care about free speech.
