Thread by @evirae

NEW: Lotta articles dropping today about Elon Musk & Twitter, and none of it is good.

A long-term fix doesn’t just involve getting Twitter’s costs under control. It has to involve making Twitter a better place for most people to spend time.
bit.ly/3Ypsi8M

Twitter’s expenses have definitely gone down. That happens when a company lays off half its workers, watches more resign, and then simply doesn’t pay severance to many of them.
#elonmusk #elonQ

Though it created the most obvious immediate problems, I don’t think Musk’s redpilling will be the thing that destroys Twitter’s advertising business. Musk apparently loves being friends with right-wing Twitter users and trolls, and he has unbanned some of them.

What would tank the business would be if fewer people wanted to spend time on Twitter. The way those things would happen would be if Twitter became so significantly worse that a critical mass of people lost interest in it.

An algorithmic tab labeled “For You” has supplanted the classic Twitter timeline as the default display scroll on Twitter’s phone apps. This has sucked.

The algorithm powering this feed is not good, and would never be as good as simply choosing accounts to follow.

Elon Musk's Twitter: Spam in DMs, replies. Login issues on Web. QRTs and Replies not populating. The same ads, endlessly repeating with each refresh. The "see who replied to this tweet" button being duplicated and triplicated.
#genius #engineer #failure

It requires some dissonance to spend so much time on a platform that bans journalists for doing journalism and seems to craft content moderation policies according to what is personally annoying to the owner.
#elonmusk #freespeech #censorship #dictator

And now, removing the free #API, Twitter will lose many bots that gave it charm- as well as incredibly important research (which, if he charges for the API for research in the EU, he'll be treading into legal issues).