Will Musk ruin Twitter?

[KyriakosCH]

I think he will. He is really the last person who should have been allowed to buy Twitter - so you can also thank (apart from Musk's ridiculous recklessness) the greedy Twitter previous owners who couldn't resist selling.

[LimpingFish]

He already has.

[KyriakosCH]

"Let that sink in" 

I hope the art part of Twitter will survive, but yes, Twitter may be literally destroyed by this idiot.

[AndreasBlack]

Depends what you mean by ruining it, but i'd say, no. If he likes to use Twitter, he'll find ways to make it even better and i think he has the potential to do it, i on the otherhand still struggle with getting what's the big deal with Twitter, so i would most definately ruin it if it was up to me Time will tell.

[LimpingFish]

If he likes to use Twitter, he'll find ways to make it even better and i think he has the potential to do it...

Based on what? Musk is, by and large, a fraud. He was born into money, and hasn't shown any business acumen besides buying up companies with obvious potential. He has created little of worth, though he takes credit for a lot.

No, he's a (thin-skinned) fraud, who likely bought Twitter out of spite.

I foresee two outcomes; Twitter simply peters out, much like Myspace, as people move en masse to other platforms, and we all move on with our lives.

Or, more likely, Musk sells it for considerably less than he paid.

[Khris]

Agreed 100%.

It's also really funny how the new verification system immediately and predictably want up in flames. People made accounts like LookheadMartini (still giggling at that one), bought verified status for 8$ then tried to get retweeted while posting basically "what if companies were honest" tweets.

Ken Klippenstein has posted a bunch in the last few days: https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/1591262905101479936

Also this happended:

 

[KyriakosCH]

If you are the owner or ceo of a huge platform, the last thing you should do is try to be a star in it. Reminds me of what happened with the ceo of Reddit who was altering posts by people who were writing against him. But Musk is a lot worse, and I agree that it seems he did buy Twitter simply out of spite and because he is so angry his recklessness was used against him.
I see him as a luckier version of Elizabeth Holmes, and at some point tesla (yes, with a small "t", Tesla himself was a giant ) stock won't be overpriced - if/when that happens, his fall will be instant.
It was also a major error of judgement by Musk to invite more scrutiny on him by buying a platform so many people use. Before the Twitter saga with him started, I never looked into his credentials and was very surprised to find that he has no actual scientific (or math) degree to speak of. He is just pretending to be a science/math guy when he is another conman.

[Danvzare]

As far as I can tell, his intention was to never buy Twitter, but to instead stir up trouble. Which in turn landed him into trouble, and forced him to buy Twitter. Now he's trying to make lemonade out of lemons and seems to be failing.

Does this spell the end of Twitter? Possibly.
But if it does, I can only see that as both inevitable and good.

I mean, didn't Instagram pretty much already replace Twitter in the same way Twitter replaced Facebook and Facebook replaced MySpace? It's an never-ending cycle, of which Instagram itself isn't even the latest in the chain. I think that might be WhatsApp or Discord or something.
It's all the same thing either way. And it's a thing I never understood. 

[KyriakosCH]

But Facebook still exists (and is meaningful eg if you want a group for your work/ I use it for the people who enlist in my online literature seminars). I never used Instagram and know nothing about it :/ Twitter is very good for indie art projects (including computer games)

Musk just sucks and should be identified as a massive conman.

[Mandle]

What if actually IS trying to improve the world and has correctly identified Twitter as something that needs to be destroyed as part of this master plan?!

(I don't believe this by the way, but it would be a good excuse for him to use when Twitter goes under)

[KyriakosCH]

What if actually IS trying to improve the world and has correctly identified Twitter as something that needs to be destroyed as part of this master plan?!

(I don't believe this by the way, but it would be a good excuse for him to use when Twitter goes under)

So Musk is the living embodiment of the  emoticon

[KyriakosCH]

I thought of a nerdy (and likely worse than just bad) joke, so I will write it, sorry in advance 

If we assume that Trump is a derivative of Musk, then Biden is the antiderivative of Musk, and with Musk clearly being a linear function with huge slope (his ego) => Biden = half of a very large number times X^2.
Which makes sense, since Biden is in many ways a parable.

[Gilbert]

I don't know, but I think Twitter was already ruining itself since it tried to enforce people to log in just to read tweets.

I never have a Twitter account, and I had been reading tweets from people without problems, until recently, when just scrolling down a bit in someone's site would generate a pop-up asking me to log in and you cannot make it go away. Not long before, this measure could be defeated by just browsing the site in a incognito Window, but this is no longer the case now.

I know those of you who already have a Twitter account would not notice this and would not even care about it, and I am not saying I wouldn't register for an account either. I just thought it's not time yet. However, all those stupid stuff happening recently (forcing me to register to read stuff) just discouraged me to register for an account now, ever.

That a stupid evil overlord an inconsiderate billionaire buying the whole thing and pushing it towards a cliff just added oil to a dumpster fire. Not to mentioned the small incident when another billionaire former president of some third-world country had attempted to ruin it already a bit earlier, and I sometimes imagine what would happen if this billionaire former president bought the thing instead of that other one who manufactured explosive electric cars to go to space. Who will win as a worse boss? Let's pick up the fight!

[KyriakosCH]

I think that the likeliest outcome is he will ruin the platform and then sell it for a small fraction of what he paid, to whoever wants to buy it - probably some controversial figure who is also an edgelord - at which point Twitter will have officially died.
But people should recall that for this to happen, not only conman Musk was needed; you also needed the previous owners of Twitter, who obviously only cared about trapping Musk and getting away with easy money and couldn't care less about Twitter or its users 

[Khris]

A bunch of people have argued (and I agree) that Twitter should ideally be run by the government(s) as a public service (because it's not merely the current thing destined to go the way of MySpace, Twitter is rather a unique and very useful platform, despite all the bullshit that's also on there).

Musk is a manchild trying to desperately achieve one of the few things endless money can't buy: being a "cool guy". He's also in the process of firing all the people who kept twitter running, and they can't simply be replaced by new people because they took home all the institutional knowledge. So twitter is probably going to become unusable soon because it's already showing the small cracks that are a telltale sign of collapse.

So my vain hope is that it's eventually going to become a public service, or that Mastodon isn't going to buckle under the influx of new users and turn into a usable alternative.

[Cassiebsg]

The "old" owner can take a fraction of his earnings by the sale,hire all the fired personnel and give them better pay, create a new improved platform Twitter 2.0 called "Coollibri" and invite all Twitter users to join... thus killing Twitter. After all, a social media platform is only as valuable as it's users. Everybody wins... well almost everybody... 

[Creamy]

I don't know, but I think Twitter was already ruining itself since it tried to enforce people to log in just to read tweets.

Sadly this is the norm nowadays. Pinterest, Instagram, Quora... they won't let you just browse. Registration everywhere.

The "old" owner can take a fraction of his earnings by the sale, hire all the fired personnel and give them better pay, create a new improved platform Twitter 2.0 called "Coollibri" and invite all Twitter users to join... thus killing Twitter

For the price they paid    the new owners certainly requested a non-competition clause.
But some fired employees will certainly go to a competitor.

[KyriakosCH]

"Coolibri" 

[Khris]

Btw, Shaun had (as usual) a great take on this whole situatiuon:

[LimpingFish]

I don't know, but I think Twitter was already ruining itself since it tried to enforce people to log in just to read tweets.

If you click the "log in" button, a second form opens that can be closed, allowing you to keep scrolling.