Why set up this false dichotomy? Elon might burn down his $44b investment in an attempt to run Twitter as a mostly successful business. Running a car company and running a social media company are not the same skill set. It is entirely possible, and seems more likely than it did a week ago, that he has no idea how to actually turn Twitter into a success.
>What exactly are the dangers of using Twitter if it might stop existing say 3 years from now?
Content and followers on Twitter cannot easily and directly be transferred somewhere else. Any personal investment a user makes into Twitter today is at risk of being worthless if Twitter disappears. Whether that matters you or not depends on why you use Twitter. If it is for fun, that isn't a real risk. But plenty of people use Twitter as part of their job and these people really need to start considering if investing in their Twitter account is worth it compared to moving that effort somewhere else.
Elon has successfully run more than just a car business in a wide variety of fields.
There are free apps that let you archive your Twitter feed, and there are free apps that let you find messed it on users from their Twitter account. I'm sure those tools would get even better and easier to use if the writing was on the wall that Twitter is going down.
What you say about personal investment is true, but it is true about literally everything. If you personally invest in Macedon, I messed it on fails, then you have wasted your time and all of your work is worthless.
But that is still a false dichotomy because I don't need to know the right answer to recognize boneheaded management. Any independent observer can see that Musk is going back and forth on certain decisions: saying "comedy is now legal on Twitter" then banning parody accounts for mocking him or laying people off then immediately asking them to come back. These are self inflected mistakes that I recognize as objectively bad management without knowing the specifics of how to properly manage Twitter.
>Elon has successfully run more than just a car business in a wide variety of fields.
And none have been a media company let alone a social media company. Building cars, rocket ships, and tunnels are all relatively similar from a management perspective and are very different from running a social media company. Running a social media company requires a much more complex understanding of people and social systems. It isn't as simple as just building a good product. Twitter's technical product was never the primary issue with the company. The problems Twitter faces are all human problems. Musk hasn't shown an ability to fix those type of issues.
>There are free apps that let you archive your Twitter feed, and there are free apps that let you find messed it on users from their Twitter account. I'm sure those tools would get even better and easier to use if the writing was on the wall that Twitter is going down.
Those apps are generally worthless at the scale we are talking about. Twitter has 450m monthly users. Mastodon has 1m. Retaining 0.2% of your audience when transferring platforms doesn't provide much value.
>What you say about personal investment is true, but it is true about literally everything. If you personally invest in Macedon, I messed it on fails, then you have wasted your time and all of your work is worthless.
Yes, the point it that it didn't seem like Twitter failing was a likely situation a year ago. Today it seems like a realistic possibility.
I just can't understand anyone that lists that as the first gripe or example regarding how he is running things poorly. Elon also lined up at billions of dollars from institutional investors to take Twitter private, and I'm fairly sure they had an understanding of Elon before a week ago. And yet they still gave him billions of dollars.
May I guess that you were an Elon negativist, or a mastodon positivist before there was any mention of Elon buying Twitter?
I'm not saying that Elon is guaranteed to succeed, I'm saying that it isn't clear that he is bound to fail. Most CEOs of social media companies that reach a billion plus dollar valuation don't have any experience running social media companies either. But somehow they do it.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about the likelihood of Twitter failing. Would you like to place a friendly wager on it ? I'd happily bet $1 on whether Twitter is dead on basically anytime frame that you would provide less than 5 years.
That isn't true[1].
>I just can't understand anyone that lists that as the first gripe or example regarding how he is running things poorly. Elon also lined up at billions of dollars from institutional investors to take Twitter private, and I'm fairly sure they had an understanding of Elon before a week ago. And yet they still gave him billions of dollars.
It was listed as the first gripe because it is objective. Musk said one thing then did another. There are levels of debate you can have about most of his other management issues. There is no debate here. This is a situation in which Musk said Twitter would handle a situation in a certain way then they immediately handled it a different way.
>May I guess that you were an Elon negativist, or a mastodon positivist before there was any mention of Elon buying Twitter?
No. You can look into my post history if you need proof. I am a fan of Tesla, I think they make great cars. However, Musk in the last couple of years has seemingly become more and more detached and destructive.
I think Mastodon is doomed to fail (or at least never succeed) because centralization was not Twitter's main problem and the federated nature of Mastodon can actually exacerbate those real issues.
>Most CEOs of social media companies that reach a billion plus dollar valuation don't have any experience running social media companies either. But somehow they do it.
But they at least usually have worked in media or social media before. Dorsey's and Zuckerberg's qualifications to run their billion-dollar companies was that they grew those companies into a billion dollar entities. Agrawal's qualification was that he worked at Twitter for years before becoming CEO of the company. Musk's qualification is that he has billions of dollars.
>I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about the likelihood of Twitter failing. Would you like to place a friendly wager on it ? I'd happily bet $1 on whether Twitter is dead on basically anytime frame that you would provide less than 5 years.
Nothing I said here is a prediction that Twitter will fail, what failure even means for a company like Twitter, or the timeline that failure might play out over. My point is that failure wasn't a real concern a year ago, now it is, and the only reason for that is Musk's management.
[1] - https://www.vulture.com/2022/11/kathy-griffin-twitter-banned...
The rules[0] state:
> What is required under this policy?
> To avoid confusing others about an account’s affiliation, parody, commentary, and fan accounts must distinguish themselves in BOTH their account name and bio
In the screenshots[1], you can see that he said the account is a parody in the bio, but not the name. Only specifying it in the bio means that you would look like a real account when tweet replying.
My point is that failure isn't a more real concern than it was previously, except for, largely, people who already hate Elon, or, perhaps in your case, for people who are misinformed about policy rules and violations.
[0] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/parody-accoun...
[1] https://twitter.com/connorratliff/status/1589473721030701058...
That page also lists permanent suspension as the third punishment that comes after warnings and a temporary suspension. This round of punishments seemed to mostly go straight to permanent suspensions, but that wasn't consistent. Kathy Griffin and Griffin Newman have received permanent suspensions, but Sarah Silverman didn't. Is there a reason for that? Who knows?
Part of the problem with Musk's management is that it is impossible to know what the current rules are at any given moment. Is that page actually Twitter's current policy or not? Who knows?