Twitter is dying
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Depending on how you use Twitter, Mastodon might be a good alternative.
We laugh about the ancients when they tried to predict the future from the entrails of slaughtered animals. But to try to predict it from news articles on the web…? The entrails reading ancients would be laughing about us!
You don't need internet thinkpieces to divine the direction of that arrow.
It's not impossible to turn that around. But odds aren't in favor.
You say Twitter skeptics are just saying what they want to be true. What would you think if someone told you that their favorite social media site had lost half its value in five months but they were sure it was gonna turn around soon? Would that seem likely to someone without an emotional investment?
Running a social media site costs. Not even Musk has the liquid capital to keep it afloat as a public service at this loss rate. Either he comes up with a radical new income stream, or he'll have to shut it down or sell it. How virtuous his plans are, how much cultural value Twitter has, these things are irrelevant. A car won't go without gas.
Also, you didn't answer my question.
I'd venture that it's probably lost a lot more than half of its brand value as well.
If people want Twitter to die (note it's 2023 and AOL is still around so it might take a while), something better has to come along.
Like AOL, Twitter will be dead in every way that really matters long before the corporate entity is shut down.
It's kind of funny how Twitter became what AOL once aspired to be - a walled garden where all that separates you from your destination is a single #keyword.
The second, more structural reason is a common theme with brand equity, you can do a lot of things over time to damage a brand and non of them invididually will sink your company. But these shots to the company accumulate, and eventually it's gone too far to come back from, you can't recover. To a certain extent you saw this with digg, the redesign was the obvious exodus point, but the trust had been lost far earlier - people were ready to walk away.
In the same way, Twitter doesn't look today like it's collapsing, but it's done a lot of permanent damage to itself. That broad base of quirky and interesting people you used to follow on twitter? They're not there anymore, they don't want to be on that weird homophobic guy's platform. Some of the people have stayed, but those communities largely exist on other platforms now, Twitter is no longer the centre of gravity. But those aren't the thing making twitter a billion dollar platform. The platform is still busy, but it's full of crypto bros and VC influencers, people who will take great pride in telling you how AI is going to make <person with high social status> unemployed. But that's not a healthy ecosystem - those are the guys who move in to try and farm social capital from the high status individuals, but the high status individuals aren't there anymore - a deliberate move from Elon. So yeah, it's still alive, but to some extent the value has already walked out the door. There hasn't been the big bang to crystalize this yet, but it seems highly likely that Twitter has given up its space as a cultural centre-peice. The cool kids have moved on.
The only requirement is a sound argument. The source is an unimportant detail.
For example, the more CNN reported about COVID and Vaccines, the less likely the already vaccine hesitant were to get one.
Obviously for contentious topics you need to modulate this based on how politicized the topic is and which media outlet is reporting (or not reporting) it. In this case, the people who are fans of Musk are almost exclusively the same people who oppose the outlets that have been posting negative stories about Twitter.
If Fox News, NYPost, or CoinMarketCap were posting negative stories about Twitter, then GP may have a point - the stories would eventually inflict damage to the brand. But as it stands today, the only outlets crusading against Twitter are the same outlets to which most Twitter supporters are most fervently opposed, so the negative coverage will only make Twitter more endearing to them. Anyone more agreeable to those outlets probably already dislikes Twitter/Musk, so the negative branding effect will be mostly negligible.
EDIT: It used to be crypto bots. Now it's mostly american far right (or foreign agents pretending to be american far right) bots. Sorry, no link here, just personal experience.
Is it possible, given the revelations of the Twitter Files, that those viewpoints were (whether bot-originated or not) suppressed until recently?
Edit: grammar
As of sometime recently every time I follow a Twitter link on social media in my regular browsers a warning comes up shaking me down for money to continue using SMS 2FA or disable it altogether, so I just open it in incognito or, better yet, not at all.
I thought 2FA was an entry level account safety requirement these days, but apparently now it's a premium monetized feature! Maybe Tesla can take a cue from this book, and offer curtain airbags only to premium customers.
This is not the news.
The news is that this is not an event deemed significant. This is the norm.
Literally the opposite of true.
Like Meta verified, now everyone has to pay for a checkmark or blue tick to show that you are not a bot. Even if you are running one, it won't be entirely for free nor will there be freedom of consequences like it was before. Identity verification on this, will be a tiny price to pay for that blue checkmark.
But it is actually journalists that are running scared of ChatGPT and GPT-4 that actually 'dying' and feel the need to write nonsense like this.
TechCrunch editors not only still use Twitter, but they still need it.
Do people seriously think Musk is this much of a comic book villain? The article doesn't back up its assertion.
From the article:
> It almost doesn’t matter if this is deliberate sabotage by Musk or the blundering stupidity of a clueless idiot. The upshot is the same: Twitter is dying.
There is a small but fascinating group of Musk superfans that can’t seem to imagine _anyone_ that would question his intelligence.
Even when someone writes “stupid clueless idiot” there’s a group that will see those words and somehow read “Genius of untold intellect. The author meant to write ‘Eldritch cerebral phantom wielding unfettered power with the lathe of heaven that he invented’ but made a typo and accidentally posted “dumbass baby man’ instead”
Has he proven himself to be that petty, spiteful and juvenile? Yes. Time and time again.
I don't think he's sabotaging Twitter just for the lulz, I think he's desperately (and ineptly, while seeing himself as Tony Stark playing 5d chess) trying to recoup his losses from a gamble he was forced to take, and having fun trolling the "woke hivemind."
Initially the payed checkmark will open up a small stream of revenue for social media companies - Twitter, Facebook/Instagram, etc, later it will be used for identity verification - first by paying a sum, which can be traced back to a bank account and later by uploading official documents or linking to some government service.
Twitter or Meta could be identity providers and get actual money for providing this service for other platforms. I can see Twitter & Meta being the providers for the "internet passport" in the future. Bleak, but possible and lucrative.
But seriously, there is no good alternative on this market at this moment yet.