Mildly Infuriating

Hopefully this leads to Twitter not being the public square of the internet anymore at least mainstream wise. The man is doing everything to make the site worse.

Great for the fediverse! I suspect that these changes to twitter and reddit are mainly a response to the growing hunger of generative artificial intelligence companies who are hoovering up data, basically for free. Change is never easy, but i'm optimistic that this is the break open source and federated communities needed to start taking off. I hope people can see the value in decentralizing and help support these open source projects financially so that they can really start to scale. The reality is, scaling is expensive, and we all need to help where we can. These Ai companies will not hesitate to suck up federated data also. If we want to live in an ad free world its gonna cost us.

At the risk of sounding tin-foily...

Twitter's financials for server costs have never made sense - the amount of money required to serve the sheer volume of engagement can't possibly have been resolved by ads that Elon is somehow refusing to keep tapping into.

I'd wager that some other interested party engaged in some type of private-public partnership was floating costs for (let's call it "privileged") access to the backend of Twitter -- granting a bottomless pit of funding to keep the platform running no matter the cost.

Once Twitter left the hands of someone deemed trustworthy, that life support doesn't stick around -- leaving Twitter facing complete insolvency by October of this year unless Musk literally does whatever he can to reduce engagement to save on costs.

Twitter loses more money when it has more engagement. If you have 100k users and add a new one, every interaction that additional user makes with tweets viewed by those 100k existing users requires 100k updates pushed to those 100k users' pages. Every like sends an update of +1 like on the tweet to every one of the 100k users. It becomes significantly more expensive per user engagement.

The ads being seen by additional users don't cover that constantly-compounding cost to keep engagements up to date across the platform. Musk isn't being honest about the reasoning (web scraping issues my ass) and is scrambling to buy desperately-needed to keep the platform up past October.

I think this goes to show just how impossible a business model like Twitter's was from the jump and shines a light on the absurdity of it being self-sustaining without a massive source of reliable external funding.

Edit: fixed typo

And twitter blue dumbasses eat it up. Legit one of them said “he created a problem, and now he’s created a solution”. No, he didn’t say that as a criticism. He was telling people to buy twitter blue.

This feels like the shit reddit pulled today

All official local, national, global government and information/news services should immediately set up Mastodon/Lemmy instances, or at least accounts on established federated instances. It's the only way to insure stability. Musk and his Saudi/RW anti-democratic partners acquired twitter to kill it.

Well it worked for me, deactivated today. First RIF now twitter, what a day.

Lemmy, KBin and Mastodon fullfil all the needs for online news outside of dedicated news sites for me by now, Twitter is something I haven't used directly for months now.

I always held out hope that Musk was going to be the one to destroy Twitter. I’m still hoping that’s his ultimate goal.

To buy Twitter just to destroy that cesspool and Musk will always be the hero we needed

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Twitter is like The Producers in that the owner seems like he's trying to destroy and also they've introduced nazis.

I admire the pettiness to buy the platform that is bullying you then running it into the ground lmao

My pet theory...... Though I don't believe it.

Musk and u/spez are playing 4-dimensional chess. The end goal is to increase freedom and user choice. By slowly destroying their respective platforms, people are driven to the fediverse, the idea of centralised platforms is tainted, power is shifted back to the user and long term everyone is better off.

It is a nice thought experiment.....

He'll probably get some total write-off when it fails and get $44B returned to him (from the tax payers, of course)