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flabberghaster wrote

Reply to comment by devtesla in watching twitter implode is pretty fun tbh by hollyhoppet

I think the way he's messing with verification has a good chance of tanking the place. Either he's going to walk it back or a lot of high profile people who twitter users care about but who don't depend on twitter for their jobs will just leave. This was already happening but it will get much worse.

The ad revenue dropping as companies quit buying ads will be a slower thing. I think they'll probably come back if there stops being so much bad press about it, but they may not, twitter is not that good at converting views to sales. With the billion dollar a year debts, I don't know how they're going to get ahead of it.

And with the chaotic layoffs (layoffs were probably already coming but there was no planning at all) I wouldn't be surprised if there were a high profile hack or prolonged outages as all the security and SRE teams were gutted without much planning.

I think the site will keep going for a long time but it will get substantially shittier very quickly and begin a long-term decline.

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twovests wrote

I agree on the high-profile hack/outage being plausible, and I'd argue that would be the most likely thing to kill Twitter.

Twitter is definitely full of entangled arcane hacks that keep it running. There's definitely people working there who relied on shifting knowledge that was never written down anywhere.

"Twitter just stops working forever" is a very plausible outcome! I'm so excited!

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devtesla wrote (edited )

I like to think of two different twitters, the upper case Twitter the company that runs twitter and the lower case twitter that is the actual product.

Uppercase T Twitter is fucked. It's not really about the firings or advertisers leaving, it's that musk bought the company with billions in debt then transferred that debt to Twitter. There's no world where musk cuts costs and increases revenue enough to keep this house of cards up.

Lowercase t twitter has shown itself to be remarkably consistent even as uppercase T Twitter flails. There's a lot of things uppercase T is going to do that will make lowercase t worse: it's going to go down more, it's going to deprioritize accessibility, there's going to be more high profile hacking, there's going to be more spam. I don't think any of that is going to be deadly, though! People still use email even though it has all those problems and more. There's something about the core product that is useful and, more importantly, addictive.

I could be wrong, Musk could truly run it into the ground instead of selling it off. The changes he makes might have more of an effect that I think! But I have a sense that less is going to change, even if blue checks are gone or whatever.

Edit: On verification, I believe it does much less that people think it does. The real problem is less moderation to actually enforce rules against impersonation. It may mean big accounts Post less. But yeah, what keeps people on twitter is less the big accounts and more the general rumbling and gossip so that might be less of a problem that it appears.

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