[throwaway82388]

I've seen it remarked and it seems generally agreed upon that Twitter was overstaffed. The extent to which that was true is unclear, because whether Twitter's service meaningfully degrades or not remains to be seen. There's an $8 blue subscription being floated, but otherwise, to what extent the new leadership will change the core service remains to be seen. Whether power users sustain a revolt or exodus remains to be seen.

Dorsey left, didn't he? There's been some fairly major executive turnover over the years. Twitter sort of hummed along, didn't it?

You remarked, hyperbolically I'd say, that he speed ran the destruction of a $40 billion-whatever acquisition in mere weeks. That may turn out to be true. But it hasn't happened yet. I think many people want this to be true, but this is an exceptional event and is hard to make dispassionate predictions about. It's possible, but improbable that it'll take the shape of Newscorp's myspace acquisition, or Verizon's yahoo acquisition. Those were services that were already in steep decline. I don't know for sure, but Twitter appears to be relatively stable when it comes to user activity.

Overall, I think the prognostication around this acquisition has been inflamed by culture war biases.

[wnevets]

> You remarked, hyperbolically I'd say, that he speed ran the destruction of a $40 billion-whatever acquisition in mere weeks. That may turn out to be true. But it hasn't happened yet. I think that's because the prognostication around this acquisition has been inflamed by culture war biases.

You have already agreed with me on this in a different comment. The pre Musk version of Twitter no longer exist, it has been destroyed. Musk has destroyed it. Whether or not the brand name of Twitter continues to exist or be popular is yet to be determined but Twitter as we knew it is dead.

The Atari brand name and intellectual property continues to exist but that pioneering video game company hasn't existed for decades

[throwaway82388]

Twitter is a very successful product, but by most accounts a highly dysfunctional company. They have one hit product, the core microblogging service. It has evolved admirably. But new products and features introduced by Twitter have had chequered success, to be charitable. Promising acquisitions in growth areas (Periscope, Vine) have withered and died under their stewardship.

The value of their core product is not primarily technical but social and cultural, as has been pointed out ad infinitum (the “twitter clone” microblogging weekend project in new language/framework is a cliche). Musk does have the ability to quickly burn that cultural capital. But it’s too early to tell to what extent it will happen, and in what ways it will hurt the service.

Even the most outraged user claims are unreliable. Too many users get too much value out of the professional, cultural and social networks they’ve formed using Twitter. I’ve already read one gloomy, regretful account of migrating to mastodon. There’s a high probability that many of these users, who are loud but unquestionably in the minority, will eventually return after self imposed exile.

Whether the product itself will implode or degrade for technical reasons, very few are in a position to accurately predict.

Comparing Twitter to Atari seems unfair to Atari, a company that had success in several markets and that successfully innovated for a sustained period of time.

I think an instructive comparison may be Musk’s acquisition of The Onion staff, which (according to my memory of the incident) he did primarily out of spite. His attempt to launch a rival humor website with those writers flopped disastrously, and was quickly forgotten. It’s support for the argument that Musk will approach a cultural product with an engineering mindset. But it remains to be seen what, if anything, he learned from that experience.