this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Took over Twitter. Ruined it. Then : "The sad truth is that there are no great 'social networks' right now,".
How did he ruin it though? I hear that all the time but I myself haven't noticed any changes. Well, except for a logo but that's very minor
For a product the logo and brand recognition are not minor. Twitter was so well known and ubiquitous that the word "tweet" was included in dictionaries around the world. He threw that away and replaced it with a generic X, and no one can figure out how to call posts on that platform now.
But other than that, he has a very particular stance on moderation and free speech. He thinks hateful comments are just fine, as long as they aren't strictly against the law. But he also doesn't apply the same standards to himself, removing stuff he doesn't like even though it would be ok according to his own rules. He also gutted the Twitter/X staff, particularly the tech departements, leading to numerous outages and technical problems. All this has made it an even worse platform for civil public discourse, and it wasn't all that great before he took over imo.
Thanks for the explanation. For me none of that, well, except for content moderation, really matters. I just didn't understand why people blame Elon when the platform has already been overrun by bots way before he took over. Whenever I look at it, It's all crypto and political spam. Who cares what logo looks like, or how many people work on it, when there's no good content to begin with?
Think about this. Staff soon may not have a place to work if they don't work from home. Musk hasn't been paying vendors or rent on Twitter offices for some time now. His failure to pay server costs caused outages and a scramble from what staff remained to move that info off google servers he didn't want to pay for and onto servers he owns. This kind of thing may not effect all users on a daily basis, but imagine if your landlord just decided not to pay the utilities bill out of your rent. Eventually the city or municipality would shut off the electric or water. You can't have a domicile that doesn't have electric and water. The place would be condemned and all renters would be out of their homes. That's basically a very similar scenario to what's happening at Twitter.