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Comment by seesaw | Hacker News Reader

There is also a question of spending $44B to rebuild a company from scratch. Couldn’t Musk have spent under a billion to create a startup and effectively competed with Twitter ?

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If he really wants to do that, by buying Twitter he removed the incumbent and also acquired its users. Much easier than competing and trying to make people switch to a new service.

My unverifiable prediction: no matter how many users will leave Twitter, the ones left will be more than the ones that would be using a new service after 1, 2, 5 years.

Users are running away just as employees who weren't fired.

He might retain something like a single digit percentage of users, but that would still be a lot more than if he started from scratch.

How often websites/apps that were really good at some point, rose back from dead to glory?

Well, not often, no. I'm not really expecting that to happen with Twitter, I just think it IS a possibility. How many websites/apps that were as big as Twitter have totally disappeared?

GeoCities, Myspace are the two biggest I can think of.

I'd argue neither was anywhere near as big as twitter. In terms of users, maybe — I have no idea. But in terms of reach and influence? I don't think so.

I think regardless numbers, it is usually a slow burn for situations like these. And probably plenty of people will probably not see a space to fill and try their luck. Hopefully, one of them will work.

Those users are all hardcore addicts whose lives revolve around Twitter. It won't take much to get them crawling back IMO

I take a look at twitter, and there's more activity than ever. Everyone is talking about twitter.

Where will users go - parler?

So like truth.social? Not sure that approach is working

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