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Maybe, but the truth is that Twitter is not doing okay. It hasn't been doing okay ever since Elon bought the site, and it's because his purchase saddled the co

Maybe, but the truth is that Twitter is not doing okay. It hasn't been doing okay ever since Elon bought the site, and it's because his purchase saddled the company with so much debt that he basically had no choice but to drastically change course. In other words, the pretense that the site is doing just fine and that reports of its death are being overblown by a bunch of people with political axes to grind is _also_ a narrative, and one that simply doesn't foot with reality.

smsm42 3y ago
> It hasn't been doing okay ever since Elon bought the site No, it hasn't been doing ok way before that, if you accept the criteria that the article purports to have (like supporting scientific discussion and surfacing complaints of dissenters, ignored by the mainstream sources) as the face value. Of course, that would be silly, because the real purpose of the article is to say "see, a bad man from the bad tribe took over Twitter and it's all awful now". > because his purchase saddled the company with so much debt that he basically had no choice but to drastically change course. He didn't hide his intentions to "change course" from the start. So it's not something that anything forced him to do - it's something that he bought it for. You can argue he was wrong to want it, but it's certainly was the goal, not a consequence of debt or anything else. > the pretense that the site is doing just fine and that reports of its death are being overblown by a bunch of people with political axes to grind is _also_ a narrative Of course. To argue against this narrative, one has to define what "just fine" means. I saw useful links on twitter before (occasionally), I see them now in pretty much the same quantity. Is it fine for me? Sure. Somebody got their safe space bubble ruined. Is it fine for them? Probably not. How do I generalize that? I don't know. I certainly know people with political axes to grind are significant part of the crowd claiming it's not fine, and this article provides massive amount of evidence for that. But yes, I do not know if there are other significant groups of people whose problems are of non-political nature, and how big these groups of people are and how vital their presence for twitter. This article is no help to me in that question.
- LexiMax 3y ago
  > I saw useful links on twitter before (occasionally), I see them now in pretty much the same quantity. You and I actually use Twitter in the same way. The era of Elon's ownership is the most unreliable the site has been since the days of the Fail Whale. The recent reliability fails have been publicized and obvious to those who engage with the site, and I've anecdotally noticed an uptick in the use of twitter proxies like fxtwitter, vxtwitter, nitter, threadreader, and others to help make twitter posts more available and reliable. This is on top of the other existential threats to the site. The company is still mired in an enormous amount of debt. The site cannot attract even the marginal ad spend that the previous ownership managed. Threads has yet to release a publicly available web interface. BlueSky has yet to leave private beta. So I feel very justified in saying that Twitter has not been doing okay since the Elon purchase, and I didn't even have to bring partisanship into the equation.

smsm42 3y ago

> It hasn't been doing okay ever since Elon bought the site No, it hasn't been doing ok way before that, if you accept the criteria that the article purports to have (like supporting scientific discussion and surfacing complaints of dissenters, ignored by the mainstream sources) as the face value. Of course, that would be silly, because the real purpose of the article is to say "see, a bad man from the bad tribe took over Twitter and it's all awful now". > because his purchase saddled the company with so much debt that he basically had no choice but to drastically change course. He didn't hide his intentions to "change course" from the start. So it's not something that anything forced him to do - it's something that he bought it for. You can argue he was wrong to want it, but it's certainly was the goal, not a consequence of debt or anything else. > the pretense that the site is doing just fine and that reports of its death are being overblown by a bunch of people with political axes to grind is _also_ a narrative Of course. To argue against this narrative, one has to define what "just fine" means. I saw useful links on twitter before (occasionally), I see them now in pretty much the same quantity. Is it fine for me? Sure. Somebody got their safe space bubble ruined. Is it fine for them? Probably not. How do I generalize that? I don't know. I certainly know people with political axes to grind are significant part of the crowd claiming it's not fine, and this article provides massive amount of evidence for that. But yes, I do not know if there are other significant groups of people whose problems are of non-political nature, and how big these groups of people are and how vital their presence for twitter. This article is no help to me in that question.

LexiMax 3y ago
> I saw useful links on twitter before (occasionally), I see them now in pretty much the same quantity. You and I actually use Twitter in the same way. The era of Elon's ownership is the most unreliable the site has been since the days of the Fail Whale. The recent reliability fails have been publicized and obvious to those who engage with the site, and I've anecdotally noticed an uptick in the use of twitter proxies like fxtwitter, vxtwitter, nitter, threadreader, and others to help make twitter posts more available and reliable. This is on top of the other existential threats to the site. The company is still mired in an enormous amount of debt. The site cannot attract even the marginal ad spend that the previous ownership managed. Threads has yet to release a publicly available web interface. BlueSky has yet to leave private beta. So I feel very justified in saying that Twitter has not been doing okay since the Elon purchase, and I didn't even have to bring partisanship into the equation.