[CobrastanJorji]

Twitter's story is a bit different. The company was pretty conscientious of its community (as far as giant corporations go) and the magic they had accidentally bottled. It fell not because the owners sought to grow it unreasonably, but because a fool offered the owners far more money for it than it was worth, and they quite reasonably took it, and then the new owner immediately ripped it to shreds, apparently unintentionally, yet so effectively that conspiracy theories about it being intentional abound.

[surgical_fire]

Twitter was already awful long before Musk bought it.

[Blahah]

It completely died that day

[gary_0]

> It fell not because the owners sought to grow it unreasonably

Twitter was nicely profitable in 2018 and 2019[0], then went on an overzealous hiring/spending spree in 2020 and was in not-great financial shape by the time Musk happened. Maybe the previous owners could have turned it around, but we'll never know.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income...

[972811]

i don't see anything being "ripped to shreds". seems mostly the same to me as a casual user. still a toxic place that is still the best for current events. maybe a little more toxic, but it's not like it was great before

[CobrastanJorji]

To shreds, I say.

The brand value of the word "Twitter" was probably in the billions, and Musk just wiped it away. It was ruined so thoroughly that we can only intelligently talk about it by calling Twitter by its former name because its new name is confusing to even say in conversation.

Twitter's advertising revenue fell off a cliff almost overnight due in no small part to their owner's policy of loudly and publicly attacking individual Twitter advertisers for leaving Twitter.

Twitter had tens of thousands of the most famous celebrities in the world actively participating every day for free, and Musk managed to screw that up in myriad ways, not least of which by falsely labeling them as paid subscribers.

For some godforsaken reason, Twitter's opinion on who and was "notable" or not was a significant status symbol, and Twitter started selling that status symbol for $8/month.

Twitter had a truly impressive internal talent pool, and it's largely gone, ruining their ability to pivot at a time when the whole plan appears to be "wildly pivot."