> The incessant lazy about how Twitter is dying, for either technical or other reasons.
I'm absolutely shocked by the appetite people have for weekly stories proclaiming that their enemy is on the verge of being vanquished. So angry, and so incoherent and belligerent when confronted or even ignored. This is a person, not a demon. Also, a person with fairly median-of-the-road politics. He's gross because he's rich and you can't become rich without being unethical, and you can't remain rich without continuing to be, but there's 1000 other guys like him, most a bit less successful (government teat.)
It's bizarre behavior coming from people who are behaving increasingly strangely. I won't be surprised if they're his biggest backers 5 years from now, because he was their ally during some invasion, or helped to defeat some left-wing politician who they used to love until the television and the President said it was time to hate them.
I remember Tea Party people like this, but I honestly thought that kind of sensitivity to media could only thrive in fairly rural or exurban, churchy areas. Instead it's all the people who moved back into the city from the suburbs in the 90s-2000s and their dopey kids, ready to stand up for their DLC and W. Bush Republican kings. They just refuse to consume any information that upsets them. They think of it as assault, which is causing them trauma.
It's a social grouping that demands the right to be traumatized by what they just watched on television. Enough of the rant.
I think he's making a bunch of crazy, thoughtful plays borne out of the desperation of getting some worth out of this thing he was forced to vastly overpay for because of his own dumb mouth. But the valuation could have been wrong; it may not have predicted radical changes like Musk is trying, it was just assuming that this stable social network that was already half-merged with government was going to putter along as it was.
Charging more for participation seemed inevitable, and keeping that pricing structure fairly flat would make people more likely to get used to it. Those things also massacre trolls, socks, and spammers, and allow celebrities/influencers to exclusively interact with people who are willing to sign what they say, and to clean up their timelines. They also stopped both giving away their DM service for free (or at least split it into a premium/free plan), and stopped having a backend that allowed people who abuse by DM free access to the eyes of the people they wish to abuse - if you're not blue, you go to another tab or non-blues can be blanket blocked altogether i.e. if you want to talk to me, do it in public.
All of it sounds like an adventurous way to get money out of people's pockets, and give them some satisfaction in exchange. I don't know if people will pay for twitter, but the way that the internet is going at this moment, people are going to be paying for everything. Web3 but the only crypto involved is the Web Integrity API...