Elon and Twitter

Do I have to talk about Elon Musk buying Twitter?

Sigh. If I must. I bet this ages poorly.

So, Musk has bought Twitter, and I think everyone, including Musk, is going to regret this big time. I know a number of people who have already written off the site and are declaring it dead.

We’ve been through this before on other social media sites. Things this big don’t die quickly, they mostly stagnate, then slowly whither, and then slide into irrelvance (for reference: Facebook. and Myspace. And Yahoo Groups. And… And…) Come to think of it, Yahoo Groups is probably a great comparison to Twitter right now. Yahoo stopped improving it, and let it bitrot, and is spent well over a decade slowly being forgotten before they remembered it was still there and finally wound it down — and there were still many people seriously unhappy at being kicked off the site when they did.

Meanwhile, if you’ll excuse the digression, the person behind the code Yahoo bought and turned into Yahoo Groups saw an opportunity and created groups.io, which is where a lot of the Yahoo Groups refugees wound up, and it’s a going concern and doing well because if there’s a need, there’s someone who can figure out how to fill that need.

A few of my friends — maybe 10, which actually isn’t a small number for this situation — have declared the future is Mastodon and that I should come and join. I looked at Mastodon years ago, and I took a fresh look this week, and no, it’s not a place I’m interested in moving. It is, and always will be, the “linux on the desktop, this time for sure” of social networks.

I am, honestly, sticking with Twitter for now and waiting to see if Elon actually does break it badly enough to make me want to bail. I figure I have a year or more before I have to worry about that choice, and most likely, things will settle down and the “new normal” of Twitter won’t be that bad. or that much worse than today-Twitter, which let’s not forget, I’ve been calling for the ouster of their execs for years for incompetent management, so it’s not like Twitter was really great last week and now it’s dead. It was seriously messed up for a long time and run by people uninterested in fixing it.

And if I were to decide I needed to exit Twitter, at this point, I think I’d shift my time and energy over to Reddit. Which some of you who know my historical views of that site might find — unexpected — but they’ve done a fairly good job cleaning up the worst of the crap that was going on there, and they are probably the best place now to have a wide range of conversations across a range of topics in a relatively user friendly way with fairly low levels of spam or abuse for the average user.

But right now, I am waiting and seeing if Elon is going to be a worse owner than the execs he booted to the curb. I just wish it was easier to convince myself that he won’t be worse. But like in most situations where this sort of takeover happens, it makes sense to wait and see. Given how he seems to have implemented the mass layoffs, it’s not making me feel encouraged about all this.