It becomes somewhat more unstable because he fires system admins or gets them to quit. The moderation policy becomes more hands-off, making it suck even more for targets of internet hate mobs. The site occasionally does dumb "epic" shit like what reddit and Google do on April fool's. It steadily loses money for Musk, but he's unable to offload it without losing even more money.
As a business, Twitter could be made profitable by giving up on significant growth, firing all the feature development teams, and having the systems teams focus on improved efficiency and automation (so they can be fired). But I don't think Musk has that skillset. He won't cut feature development teams, because they're the ones that do his latest epic reddit bacon idea.
Aggressive monetisation and milking of the product until it collapses in on itself, several spinoffs with varying ideas occur, and one eventually rises to the status of monopoly again. Or existing rival platforms simply benefit from the collapse.
I think it is gonna crash and burn without any survivors, but I'd say "the site keeps trucking along but is shittier and stagnant like Reddit" is more likely than "dies and everyone leaves to the next big thing".
Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/etc are the most popular versions of their respective form of social media, and if they do turn a profit, it's through arcane financial bullshit or based on cooked numbers. Forums never came back after reddit/discord, every attempt at creating another reddit has been a failure that's been unable to attract a sizable audience and would have been closer to achieving their goals if they didn't use this godawful format (see: this site). Combined with a crumbling internet infrastructure and declining living standards, the only way I see these platforms surviving the decade would be if the US government saw enough value in the social control that social media provides (which might be the case, there's a reason reddit's ran top to bottom by glowies) to where they'd dump cash in these companies to keep them afloat.
You reference reddit here but forget that reddit itself was a smaller digg... Until that population imploded and moved to reddit.
This is a huge moment that Mastodon should seize. I predict Mastodon and/or Telegram walk out of this with large gains.
- Trump comes back
- Twitter is federated with parler and truth social
- In the name of "free speech", ultra right wing vitriol is allowed and boosted in the algorithm
- In the name of "combatting violence", many prominent left-wing accounts wil be banned and anyone to the left of Elisabeth Warren will be hindered by the algorithm
:trump-moist: comes back, he won't be able to resist the siren song of the blue bird.
I predict that Elon gives Trump the @POTUS handle and there is a lawsuit that goes to the supreme court.
Musk will get bored in a week and will stop even pretending to do anything
Although I still hope he unbans Trump
Gonna be a "free speech parafise" so its gonna be open game on trans and black people.
