How Twitter lost its place as the global town square

Twitter didn't lose anything, Musk bought Twitter because he thought it'd be a goof to trash, and because he wanted access to Saudi Arabian markets to sell his electric cars and rocket ships.

These stories are so fucking annoying because they purposely miss the point of what's actually happened.

Elon Musk personal worth went up 97 Billion dollars since he bought Twitter, he's now worth, on paper 248 Billion. He can take a complete loss on the investment, and not be any the poorer in real terms.

This article is well written, but the intense focus on TikTok is strange. I don’t understand how TikTok can be a source of true information or a town square for that matter. The videos are incredibly short and then the next one comes. You see a lot of dumb shit and stupid memes. It’s sometimes good at making people feel like they are learning something, but when you ask those people what they learned, they can’t synthesize or explain what it was they supposedly digested. To me, TikTok seems like pure dopamine hits without any sustainability.

Twitter, with its short character count, wasn’t any good for debate or sustained learning either. It was good for being a dunk tank—a place where people try to dunk on each other. It also became an echo chamber that helped polarize people politically. I don’t really understand the appeal of Twitter.

I dunno. They say that, but these people are totally addicted. We see it with a lot of people who come to mastodon from Twitter proclaiming they're done with twitter, and they keep going back.

Twitter was always a bad purchase, tbh.