4 ms·

To be fair, Twitter was treading water before Elon got involved.

hef19898 4y ago
A lot less so. And Twitter treading water only became a problem with regards to Tesla after Elon bought it.
jacquesm 4y ago
It was treading water, now it is underwater with its eyes glazed over, and some guy is holding it down. There is a difference.
mschuster91 4y ago
Agreed, but literally everything else would have been a better option than letting Musk of all people buy it. It's been a bad run for everyone involved: a lot of the people who built and ran Twitter are without a job, those who had to stay (H1B) are ruthlessly exploited now, Musk has lost a ton of his net worth because of TSLA tanking, TSLA investors lost a ton of money as well, and society didn't benefit from the return of high-profile neo-Nazis as well. We need to update anti-trust regulations to make sure rich individual billionaires don't have the ability to buy or control major communications platforms, no matter if it's social networks or newspapers. In the end, there's nothing positive about that.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  > It's been a bad run for everyone involved: Twitter stock owners were involved, and they did pretty well.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- jacquesm 4y ago
  And the people that spent a decade or more curating their presence on Twitter are out of luck as well because this buffoon is wrecking it.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    Yeah. My biggest issue with Mastodon is that you can't import your past Twitter posts, or that old posts won't be moved when migrating to a new instance. At least thanks to Fedifinder and other tools, finding your social network again works somewhat...
alkonaut 4y ago
It was treading water but keeping the head above the surface. Now in the next part of the analogy someone showed up with a lead lifebuoy.
threeseed 4y ago
No it wasn't. Twitter was on track to profitability after years of slowly building good will with advertisers and regulators. Then Musk saddled it with billions of debt, fired all the brand safety and policy people and dismissed advertiser's concerns. So they have paused their ads and redirected spending back to Facebook/Google. Which is why it is such a perilous state now. Collapse in revenue, extra billion a month in interest repayments and regulators hovering around.

hef19898 4y ago

A lot less so. And Twitter treading water only became a problem with regards to Tesla after Elon bought it.

It was treading water, now it is underwater with its eyes glazed over, and some guy is holding it down. There is a difference.

mschuster91 4y ago

Agreed, but literally everything else would have been a better option than letting Musk of all people buy it. It's been a bad run for everyone involved: a lot of the people who built and ran Twitter are without a job, those who had to stay (H1B) are ruthlessly exploited now, Musk has lost a ton of his net worth because of TSLA tanking, TSLA investors lost a ton of money as well, and society didn't benefit from the return of high-profile neo-Nazis as well. We need to update anti-trust regulations to make sure rich individual billionaires don't have the ability to buy or control major communications platforms, no matter if it's social networks or newspapers. In the end, there's nothing positive about that.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
> It's been a bad run for everyone involved: Twitter stock owners were involved, and they did pretty well.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jacquesm 4y ago
And the people that spent a decade or more curating their presence on Twitter are out of luck as well because this buffoon is wrecking it.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  Yeah. My biggest issue with Mastodon is that you can't import your past Twitter posts, or that old posts won't be moved when migrating to a new instance. At least thanks to Fedifinder and other tools, finding your social network again works somewhat...

alkonaut 4y ago

It was treading water but keeping the head above the surface. Now in the next part of the analogy someone showed up with a lead lifebuoy.

threeseed 4y ago

No it wasn't. Twitter was on track to profitability after years of slowly building good will with advertisers and regulators. Then Musk saddled it with billions of debt, fired all the brand safety and policy people and dismissed advertiser's concerns. So they have paused their ads and redirected spending back to Facebook/Google. Which is why it is such a perilous state now. Collapse in revenue, extra billion a month in interest repayments and regulators hovering around.