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Did he even want to run twitter? Musk doesn't really seem to be the type who wants to run the mundane daily operations of a company that is established. He bought it, he made his changes and now someone else can manage employees and emails all day long while he builds rockets.
I actually don't see the woke side winning here at all. Contrary to what some people think CNN journalists having a public group chat on twitter is a small part of twitter. Football (Soccer) is huge on twitter and the La liga and Premier premier league fans seem to care less about the twitter drama. Looking at what is trending right now in Sweden, hockey and football are 4/5 things trending right now. Twitter is huge in the middle east and Japan. Music is big on twitter, porn is big on twitter, day traders use it, it is one of the best ways to follow the war in Ukraine. Even reality TV seems to do at least as well as politics on twitter.
The journalist-class thinks twitter dies without them since their filter-bubble dies without them. Thats like saying facebook is dead without your facebook group since that is most of what you see on Facebook. However, most others don't see or care about your facebook group. Youtube stopped its annual rewind because people were angry that none of the big youtubers were on it. In reality the big youtubers you follow have 0.1% of users following them and there are huge phenomena on youtube that you have never heard of.
Elon hasn̈́'t impacted the user experience of F1 fans, people who want to follow concert tours, get live updates on the oilmarket, watch stuff explode in Ukraine, find out what is happening on a Friday night in Dubai, or view their favorite tiktoker's new video. If anything transactivists are more dependent on twitter than twitter is dependent on transactivists. The woke are powerful because of their voice and their voice is mainly social media. I highly doubt the userbase will follow them to alt-twitter that is twitter from 2021.
Check your keyboard; I think your fnords are showing.
And while you’re right about the normal use cases of Twitter, there are also push factors if you let all the witches hang around. It’s a site built around harvesting outrage via retweets.
Imagine if every time one scrolled down to the NYT comments, 10% or so were randomly replaced with Fox News comments, and vice versa. I think that’d make a lot of the casual audience either furious or jaded. The hypothesized risk to Twitter is that every topic gets polluted by [insert outgroup opinion] and people leave for cleaner bubbles.
I accept that the insulation of hentai-Twitter is evidence against this. I’m not confident that it generalizes for topics which don’t have a clear equivalent to the nsfw tag.
This feels like year zero thinking, like history started when the left assumed the zeitgeist and nothing existed before that. Hypothesised risk? Never mind hentai twitter, the whole site didn't start this censorship shit in earnest until around 2016, and before that there were no mass exits for cleaner bubbles. I don't have to imagine if every time one scrolled down to the NYT comments, 10% or so were randomly replaced with Fox News comments, and vice versa - because I lived it, and people did what they do now - bitched about it constantly but continued using twitter anyway. Hell, that's what the NYT and fox news comments sections were like before they were nixed - and both those comments sections were furious when they were shut down "to combat hate speech" (they couldn't use your hypothesis as the reason to shut them down because everyone could see with their own eyes that nobody was leaving for cleaner bubbles.)
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I will say I used to use Twitter for sports news and following foreign wars, then a little after Elon bought it I kept getting porn popping up and deleted it.
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If he didn't, why didn't he appoint someone from the start?
He is used to being the hatchet man, so conceivably he comes in, makes the unpopular but necessary moves, absorbs all the incoming fire, then hands off operations to someone who gets to start with a clean slate.
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He wanted insight into the company and make the changes he wanted. Now that he has put twitter on the course he desires he can move on.
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