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Comment by ghawk1ns | Hacker News Reader

> It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Twitter isn’t going to be that place with each new chaos monkey attack from Musk

Is this hyperbole? Twitter will be fine, Musk isn't going to train-wreck 10s of billions. Twitter today isn't even that fundamentally different from pre-Musk. The biggest change has been perception from ideological extremes. I'm sure Twitter will evolve but evolution is for growth, not death.

You use Twitter for exposure to writers, wouldn't the proposed lifting of the character limit be a net positive for writers? Wouldn't writers use Twitter more if writing on Twitter was a source of income?

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> Musk isn't going to train-wreck 10s of billions

He already has?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/18/twitter-i...

https://www.fastcompany.com/90901033/for-elon-musks-co-inves...

It's big enough and established enough that it's not going to disappear overnight, but so far the results are pretty underwhelming.

I, for the life of me, can't figure out why someone who has been successful and earned a decent amount of goodwill in other ventures, would start burning through all that to deal with social media which is just super difficult to manage even in the best of cases.

>He already has?

What’s the point of the question mark there? Are you not sure of your statement?

Based on the most recent estimates of Twitter's value, Musk has already train wrecked 10s of billions of dollars.

You mention that Twitter isn't that fundamentally different and from a product perspective, and I would mostly agree, but their finances are WAY worse than they were pre-Musk. The company has lost something like 50% of ad revenue, they've saddled themselves with something like an extra $1B dollars a year in debt payments from the buyout, and they're facing a number of large lawsuits based on how they handled layoffs.

> Musk has already train wrecked 10s of billions of dollars.

Why would a user of the site/app care about this? How is it impacting their experience?

Because if the site isn't making money, it's not sustainable. Unless musk wants to run it from his pocket money.

It doesn’t usually matter to the user “why” a product is no longer appealing.

Financial woes though will usually produce change that impacts the user, for better or worse (a good kick in the ass, or craven desperation may follow).

I never made the claim that a user should. The guy I was replying to said "Musk isn't going to train-wreck 10s of billions" and I was responding to that.

Why are you asking that like someone suggested it? This was a reply to a specific claim.

I read the replies oas being in the context of the first comment they were under. It wasn't clear to me that the context changed.

It will certainly impact my experience when Musk gets tired of losing money and sells the husk to some grifter or Verizon.

It couldn’t be more fundamentally different for people who just want to read content without an account. Previously, Twitter was a thing that existed, now it’s not a thing that exists.

99.9% of people will just click the google login button and continue on as if nothing had happened. i sympathize with you. i had to make a throwaway google account. but it's not even close to relevant to the vast majority of users. not saying that's a good thing but it's reality.

> 99.9% of people will just click the google login button and continue on as if nothing had happened

You have a very, very rosy perception of login walls. All the stats I’ve see would disagree.

> Twitter today isn't even that fundamentally different from pre-Musk.

If you don't have a Twitter account, you cannot see threads on Twitter anymore.

And if you don't pay for twitter blue you can't DM people anymore unless they know to explicitly turn off that new filter. You also are limited in how many tweets you can view in a day, and without paying your reach is also shortened.

At the same time a lot of people I never would have wanted in my feed are now showing up all the time.

If you're using twitter web, the Control Panel for Twitter browser extension takes the 'for you' abomination behind the back of the barn and gives it both barrels.

(there's also a userscript version IIRC)

The network Twitter has will be hard to break for sure. But I think it's already worth much less than what he paid. Musk needs to be careful here, it is possible to lose.

I would go further and say that at this point it will be difficult not to lose. Twitter is a wounded animal just waiting to be eaten.

Twitter feels like MySpace in 2008. Its main saving grace right now is that there isn’t the equivalent of Facebook ready to devour it. Yet.

Are you kidding? Twitter has limits on how much you can read now. It's useless for me.

I don't have a twitter account. Do you regularly hit the 1,000 tweet view limit? That's over 83 tweets an hour, for 12 hours.

Scrolling through 1,000 tweets in your timeline will take a lot less time than you imagine.

Clicking into a thread will use up those views really fast. Could easily hit 200 views in 5 minutes.

So, you hit the limit often?

I'm trying to find if there's anyone who regularly experiences hitting the limit.

I'm pretty sure the limit was one of his experiments that he's since rolled back on. It may even have been an emergency measure to mitigate the worst effects of another bug, but I'm not sure if he's ever been openly honest about any of this. There was certainly a weekend where the limit was imposed, then raised, then—I think—raised again... and I don't think we've really heard anything about it since.

Twitter doesn't track your eyeballs to see how many you literally read. It's how many has been sent to your device.

I consider myself a pretty frequent Twitter user. I don't pay and I've never run into the daily limit.

I had hit the rate limit a few trimes when it was new, but never since then. I think the limit has been either removed or vastly reduced from that experience. I don't see any of the people I follow complaining about it either.

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