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Comment by zachnwhite | Hacker News Reader

I'd be nothing without Twitter. It's had more impact on my life than any other platform. I got lucky, but luck was only part of it.

Being able to DM people is incredible. It's the AOL Messenger of 2023. If it went offline, it'd be a terrible loss.

its literally led to the complete change of my future due to the ability to follow the interactions of successful people who are active on the platform. I've learned from them as if they were my direct mentors and made huge life decisions based on some of their talking points / motivational mindset. Without it, my life would've been a bubble in Virginia with my nearest network being 5 friends who love cranking out bottle on the weekends.

Politicans and companies all over the world are using it. Controlling that information space, is real power. And I am not yet clear, how much that release will bring needed transparency. As the algorithm in production, can have major tweaks.

The importance of Twitter was it being the primary posting location for a lot of things. A number of the artists and other creatives I know have gotten absolutely gutted by this.

Gutted about what exactly? Twitter is still there and pretty much works like before.

> pretty much works like before

... did you see the source code? Blue checkmarks are weighted 4x as much as non-checkmarks. That's just one example of a major change that wouldn't have happened were it not for Elon

Except when it doesn’t because somebody was so competent and fired more than half of the engineers.

By open sourcing the algorithm? Or what?

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