Ask HN: Thoughts and feelings about Twitter under Elon? Any predictions?

Twitter is special among all social networks. It’s text based (unlike Instagram/TikTok), not tied to your real identity (like FB), but has a powerful social graph.

I don’t know what could replace it if it went away. If the users I care about go, they’ll go to Mastodon, Instagram, private Slacks, and some will flat out stop.

They’ll never be in one place again. I won’t be able to get random nuggets of jokes or really interesting threads by experts or do many other things I love about Twitter.

Metcalf’s law is too powerful. It is, for better or worse, irreplaceable. It has its problems but Twitter still feels like bits of the old “fun” internet to me that we’ve lost in so many other ways.

I don’t want to lose it, but I have little confidence it will remain.

- Moderation to be reduced, but not as much as some people would hope.

- Where can people leave to? TikTok is the only real alternative but it still has the natsec issues. As much as a lot of people complain that they wouldn't want to be on a less regulated Twitter they have no place to leave to. So no user attrition IMO.

If the TOS changes to allow a lot more content that was previously prohibited, un-ban users, etc. we may find out where actual laws may or may not apply to purely user driven content and what party can be held accountable should actions happen as the result of content.

I would expect him to do things to try and get back the $44B he spent/borrowed to purchase. Un-banning people could get more eyeballs and that is ad money. It may be a short term play to increase ad revenue, un-ban people, let them run amok to get more eyeballs until lawsuits or Federal organizations step in - with the goal of extracting as much of the $44B as he can.

If they built the ability to have private groups with a simple timeline based feed with ads on the side (i.e. not in the main feed) they could probably steal a ton of users from FB. Go back to basics - people wanting to share things with people they know while also allowing them to view the circus that is public social media. I would be very surprised if this happens. I'm more expecting what I said above - let people run amok until some entity says no or the lawsuit settlements are greater than the run amok profits.

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I'm not going to up and close my Twitter account for no reason, but I did just finally get around to opening an account on a Mastodon server. I've been meaning to start moving more to the Fediverse[2] anyway, so this isn't a complete knee-jerk thing. But all the recent brouhaha over Elon buying Twitter did serve as sort of a nudge to finally take some action in that regard.

I do eventually intend to (at least mostly) wind down my use of all "walled garden" sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc., but I will probably do so gradually. And I may leave the accounts open and populated with a bot that periodically posts a reminder of where I can be found, or something. Not sure yet.

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[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33367063

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse

Good article discusses possibilities, mainly around potential for new lack of employee attention resulting in threats to the product (stability and quality), it's legal compliance, and its users (safety and privacy) increasing in severity and frequency.

Twitter has both positively and negatively affected my life. I'm okay with whatever happens, I can't complain. If it gets bad, I'll stop using it. If it gets better, I'll start using it.

I was expecting a story with 500 votes and 1000 comments. But it's just crickets. I scrolled through "new", there are a handful of stories with like 5-10 votes and 1-5 comments.

Where is the conversation around this? It's the top headline on the NYT, and here nobody's upvoting anything around it.