Musk discusses putting all of Twitter behind a paywall

It’s clear that Musk, Sacks, Calacanis and Palihapitiya have no idea why the majority of people find value in Twitter enough to keep returning. It seems they think we’d all want to pay for the privilege of reading their tweets and those of other ‘highly online’ people.

Musk especially appears to be unable to step outside his own personal experience using Twitter, which is highly atypical to say the least.

One of Twitter’s big draws was that it was the place where almost everyone of note was sharing their thoughts in easily digestible chunks, even world leaders, and that it was also home to so many subject matter experts even in niche domains.

A fair number of Twitter’s users wouldn’t have followed or cared about blue checked users at all. Some people I know even use Twitter entirely passively while following bots that post pictures they like, or news, or similar, using it like an RSS reader.

Almost no real thought has gone into this takeover, so we should expect more chaotic throwing of ideas at the wall over the next few months. What I feel pretty sure about though is that Twitter will never again be the same ‘town square’ it was. That might be good in some areas, but it’ll be much worse for smaller interests and specialities.

At this point, would Twitter going offline really be that huge of a blow to the internet?

If it is, then maybe it's a wake up call that we all need to have.

Am I completely misunderstanding Twitter, in my understanding, there are a relatively small number of accounts — businesses, politicians, blue checks, etc. Who are trying to ‘buy’ influence of the rest of us. Yes their are some accounts that may be of some value like Steven King alluded to, but this seems to flip on its head. Really the “rest of us” value the the “blue checks” so much we’ll pay $8 to be let into the party.

That's one way to kill a town square.

...and nothing of value was lost.

All the "journalists" would need to do real work instead of just copy/pasting tweets all day.