You know, for all the talk about how twitter is going downhill and making stupid decisions, this is the only one so far that really, really, does seems stupid. Verification was bad and now it’s a joke, api rate limits have some possible argument etc - but why in the hell buy a household name just to change it? Why not build X from scratch?
It still has a boatload of users and is still the cultural town square of the tech world. To build X from scratch you'd have to convince people like Marc Andreessen, Paul Graham, a bunch of other VCs etc to move. Changing behaviour is very hard. You'd have to get people to install new apps, get use to new workflows etc and humans are creatures of habit so this is very hard.
I think this is pretty optimistic thinking. "Oh no, I can't pick my way through a bunch of bigoted garbage to which the owner responds 'Concerning' or read Marc Andreesen being deeply weird or see 30,000 reply guys to Paul Graham hawking shitcoins, whatever will I do?" is, I think, probably okay at this point.
Having the thinkfluencey types before the spam and impersonation taps were turned on to full was probably valuable; now Twitter is getting the stink on it and that's hard to wash off.
Personally speaking, Bluesky picked up pretty much everybody I care to talk to and remaining on Twitter in a material capacity is a flag that I probably don't want to hear from you.