And, for more than a decade, it appeared to work pretty well. Governments, media outlets, public-facing services of all kinds came to rely on it as their main way to talk to the public.
But now it's impossible to use without a login, most of that value has been lost.
The best thing to do is to learn from what happened, and not allow a proprietary platform to become so central again.
What a stupid platform. I can't believe it's still so popular.
Now I'm completely locked out of police reports & municipal updates in my area because it's the only platform they post on.
I heard that ads on Twitter used to be much less profitable than on other platforms because the lack of a login wall meant they weren't able to track their viewers so precisely. Fine. But, at the same time, they hosted so much valuable content that contextual advertising might well have made up much of the difference. But Twitter's support for that was apparently very basic, with only very simple keyword targetting available.
It might not have been enough once they were loaded up with debt by Elon, but before that they would only have needed a relatively small uptick in income to make them more consistently profitable. And that could have made the town square version of Twitter a sustainable business for the foreseeable future.
And now we all have to deal with the rotting corpse of X, making it much harder for whoever or whatever wants to build any new form of public realm in that area. So more than just an opportunity wasted, it's acting as deterrent to trying again.
This was around the time when he started to be openly post-truth (talking about how twitter was overrun with bots and he was going to save it and shortly afterwards feigning surprise at the same when he wanted an excuse to wiggle out after the market moved against him, continuing to push the "government censored twitter" narrative when the Twitter Files revealed the truth to be almost the polar opposite, talking about building an un-biased Grok and then getting caught with an "Elon Musk would beat Mike Tyson in a fight" size thumb on the scale, etc). When someone starts being openly post-truth like this, they stop deserving the benefit of the doubt. This wasn't a boyish fantasy, he knew exactly what he was doing, and it was saying one thing while thinking another.
In the spirit of that, here's some brainstorming:
Once upon a time Twitter used to have RSS/Atom feeds for each account.
* https://www.seroundtable.com/twitter-rss-depreciated-16973.h...
You people are completely out of touch with reality. You cannot accept that the reason of why we’re voting for the “far” right is because we experienced a whole decade of uncontrolled immigration policies that permanently reshaped the way of living of previously homogeneous countries.
The writing was on the wall for Twitter well before musk got involved, sadly.
- ebb: people realize that promises of change are empty and only enrich the few elite
- flow: people have forgotten that the promises were empty last time
Meta platforms are more responsible for atrocities in other parts of the world, e.g. Myanmar.
API access etc are business issues. Can't mix them up.
Certainly the policy of the opposition has nothing to do with the backlash. No definitely not. It's certainly just dumb people being tricked by the bad guys.
If these people could just get properly educated and shielded from the bad ideas surely they'd see the light.
The comment you replied to made no statement about the effectiveness of the project. It's like saying that George Soros is engaged in trying to elect left-wing leadership; nobody denies that.
Media is a bottom up industry, successful media is the media people want to consume. If right wing media is popular, it's because right wing messages are popular.
Acting like the media are the tastemakers is a convenient way for people to avoid looking in the mirror and doing any kind of self reflection.
The right wing is making a push in Europe because Elon Musk has a trillion dollars, not because the parties in power have done anything wrong. Their ideas are only unpopular because the bad man is lying to them. If it wasn't for all this fake news, everyone would see that I am obviously correct and we'd have 100% support.
X and it's right wing lean isn't the problem. People are attracted to right wing politics because they don't like what they currently have. The problems isn't that an alternative exists, the problem is the people don't like them.