[hylaride]

I maintain that no owner of twitter really understood what they had, either before or after Musk. Twitter was really good at news if you knew who to follow and you had direct access to a lot of experts in various fields. They had to put an enormous amount of effort into dealing with misinformation, but couldn’t figure out the balance between that and mass market appeal. The result is that they financially treaded water.

Musk thought that what people wanted was raw unfiltered “free speech”, but he thought his kinds of views were restricted. The result was when he got control, the guardrails were mostly removed and a lot of users recoiled, and advertisers left due to the desirable users targets disappearing as well as having their ads shown next to questionable content. Then he contradicted himself by blocking accounts that hit his ego.

I’m a geopolitical nerd and loved twitter, but finally gave up on it when I started getting fake news as well as promoted tweets by musk himself, whom I didn’t give a shit about his at best bizarre opinions. The blocking of third party clients meant that I couldn’t even filter client-side anymore (RIP Tweetbot).