[ilayn]

Whatever you get out for your own self is a secondary by-product. You are bounded to that platform to get what you get and cannot leave by taking what you already contributed.

While you are benefiting from certain social returns, you are also the reason why someone else's brand is growing by the same argument. Hence the platform is doing nothing but increasing its importance for its matchmaking value. That is the premise. At some critical threshold, the platform achieves the "I'm too big to bother with individual users" and declares the feudal lordship (remember similar Stackoverflow and Reddit dramas with "We do as we please" attitude and nothing happened to the platforms because users could not give up - the following mod saga for reddit and so on and accepted their fate). It already happened with social media platforms long time ago.

[bdowling]

> cannot leave by taking what you already contributed.

Of course you can. Twitter/X doesn’t own your tweets. You can take them and post them somewhere else if you want.

This is all clearly stated in the Twitter/X terms of service. https://twitter.com/en/tos

[ilayn]

Your contribution is not the storage of your tweets. You can delete them one by one or with API but it won't make any difference at this point. And you need to repost it somewhere. You have contributed to keep the platform relevant. So no you can't take them anywhere else.

[bdowling]

> And you need to repost it somewhere.

Exactly, you can repost them elsewhere. That is the opposite of “you can’t take them anywhere else.”

[TheOtherHobbes]

Twitter owns the contextual value of your tweets. It owns the virtual land on which you can seed tweets to grow value.

And it sells access to the virtual land to advertisers who put up billboards all over it.

And it gives Musk powers that feudal lords never had. He has total control over which content grows value, and which remains ignored and barren.

[bdowling]

You seem to think this situation is very different from what publishers have done for at least hundreds of years. For at least hundreds of years, publishers have published many, many books each year, only a few of which become bestsellers. The publishers have wielded a lot influence over what books become popular (e.g., by telling booksellers to place them in good spots in stores, by getting reviewers to review them).

Unlike a traditional publisher, however, to whom an author sells the exclusive right to publish a work, you have the right to take your tweets and publish them elsewhere. There are many examples of authors who have adapted their Twitter posts into blog articles or books, and published them on other platforms, or even in print.

As for the contextual value of your tweets, if the tweets form one half of a conversation with a real person whose tweets you cannot use elsewhere, then they can be recast in the form of a dialogue with a fictional person, something which has been done since the days of Socrates.