Thread by @TheChrisWinters

Last chance to see...

And no, I'm not paying for Twitter Blue. If the owner were just running a business it would be one thing. But he's changing this platform into 4chan, and making noises about "free speech" that really means "free rein for disinformation, bots, trolls and harassment."

I can't, either professionally as a journalist, or ethically as a human being, support that with money. It's basically a campaign contribution for whatever fashy cause the owner is supporting at the moment. The blue check is pretty much worthless after this, anyway.

Meanwhile, the owner is gaslighting us all into thinking it's us, the creators of the content here, who need to pony up to service the debt on his late-night impulse buy. Sorry, but we're the product, not the user. This is an advertising platform, not a Usenet-era bulletin board.

And it's all based on his fundamental misunderstanding of why this platform was popular to begin with. It's the #community, dude. We came here for each other. And now you're driving all the decent people away, leaving this a right-wing trollscape.

Nobody, I mean nobody, came here for the trolling except the trolls. And the fact that you can't tell the difference between that and community is pretty telling. Meanwhile I've found a better, if smaller, community on the elephant site. (I'm verified there, too!)

Eventually, this site's owner will be forced to sell at a huge loss. We know he's already overpaid by at least twice as much as this platform was worth. The more he degrades the service, either by firing all the key people, or inviting in his buddies to trash the place...

...the less he's going to be able to get from it in the end. It's a question of how many billions he's willing to lose to own the libs. It's $24 billion and rising, right now. Maybe Twitter will be around afterward, maybe he won't give up until it's been bled dry.

In the end, it's rather sad just how much a single overconfident and underqualified man-child can cause so much harm to so many people. We've been getting a crash course in that these past several years. It really makes its own case for taxing billionaires out of existence.

I wrote a piece about that, by the way: yesmagazine.org/issue/endings/…

So I'll continue to squat here, to hold on to the account. But everyone is going to have to be more careful to sift out the bots, con artists, impersonators, trolls and harassers. (Good rule: if they're under the "for you" tab, avoid them. At least he's made it easy to ID them.)

The owner thinks I'm so desperate for attention I'll cough up $8 or $11 per month to swim in the cesspool and fight it out with the trolls. Just no. For one, most people aren't as desperate for attention as he is. For another, well... it's his site. He can do what he wants.

He'll soon find out that his views aren't representative of anyone but a tiny minority of people. The others will leave. And when his mini-mes realize they're being ignored, they'll leave too.

Trolls need an audience in order to thrive. And no one has done a better job of killing off that audience than the owner of this site.

@threadreaderapp unroll please