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Mine, on desktop, seems to be back. Is it back to normal or is it that the 'rollover' to the new allowance day started after lunch? We shall see. I muted lots of accounts I follow that tweet or retweet a lot to clean up my timeline in case the rationing is real and ongoing. It probably needed a spring clean anyway.

I love Twitter, mine is a happy place wheee I find lots of useful things out. Mines not full of nastiness and bitterness due to who I’ve followed. been a member for 10-15 odd years

what will happen is people like me will just shrug and go “oh not welcome anymore” and we will find somewhere else, Reddit mumsnet etc. we will just spend that time elsewhere.
as numbers leave, more people will leave, and when more leave businesses will leave as their isn’t the user numbers to warrant the presence. As businesses leave, more people will leave.

he will do a cracking job of killing it.

If Twitter becomes pay only then many people will pay (I probably would, to begin with), but will then find it is less useful because of the decreased access and engagement and so stop paying. A town square with entry restricted by a paying point ceases to be a town square and becomes a commercial venue, both useful spaces in society but not the same thing at all.

The point for Musk is that of course he is entitled to charge for services as he sees fit, but I wonder if this will backfire, given Twitter's specific history and assumed purpose over the years. It's not the same as a news outlet choosing to go behind a paywall. Traditional news is a commodity that, until recently, we were completely used to paying for, and also paying for a specific site/publication gives you access to a particular slant/flavour to your news, which you might like.

The hilarity of people posting on social media about how reading social media is bad.

Musk has fucked twitter. I dropped off it as soon as he got on board and the bits I've dropped back in for have just proved to me how much he's turned it into a product I no longer find useful.

@Palmasailor you've entirely misunderstood. The users are not the clients, they are the product. Musk has just damaged the platform by blocking the product.
I suppose he bought it so he can break it if he wants, bizarre a decision as that might be.

People talk like Twitter is some sort of right. If Musk wants to do something you don't like move to a different platform or pay.

I really don't see the issue.

I don’t think he’s actually done this deliberately, I think he’s fucked something up and is using this claim of limited views as a way to cover up what they’ve done so next week they can say he’s listened to the feedback and changed it.

if he has done this deliberately, Musk has clearly gambled that most users will pay rather than just find an alternative platform. Because this will ruin viewing numbers for advertisers. If I can’t scroll I can’t see ads. If I have to pay, I’d need to be certain millions of people world wide were going to bother paying too so it will still work.

but then he’s dropped the staff from 8,000 to 550, and fired most people who know how to make the systems work - I still think this is just covering a massive fuck up.

Well it's true that there are alternatives, now, during and before Twitter (including Internet Relay Chat, Facebook, Livejournal, MySpace and other blogging platforms, Tumblr) and of course WhatsApp.

Twitter always had a low barrier for entry - didn't require much technical skill and I think in the early days people could interact with it solely via SMS text. It also didn't require much verification (double-edged sword). It was pretty frictionless to access and easy to use once there.

Before the barriers now dropping into place it was easy for non-account-holders to browse and read others' tweets and for content to be easily embedded on other platforms - so you can read someone's Tweet embedded onto a blog post, click on it and go to the live Tweet (from where you can read replies or view the sender's public profile etc).

The development of the hashtag and lists made it easy for people to coalesce around a particular topic of interest too.

I'm not sure how well the payment ideas work out in practice. Content producers feel that they're producing interesting stuff and shouldn't be charged for that. I suppose you could charge non-contributing readers but I'm not sure people would go for that either. I don't know how to solve that!

Jo

Twitters selling point was often the immediacy of news and being able to read comments / see videos of people on the ground, not just what was filtered via the mainstream media. It has enabled the truth of many situations to become clear.

last night I tried to look on twitter to see what was on the Paris riot situation , not just the bbc news highlights - but got the message within a couple of minutes of scrolling. Waiting 24 hours to read the updates is pointless when the selling point was the real time updates from normal people.

I am certain he's trying to encourage people to pay for a subscription.

By charging for features which were previously free, is just greedy in my opinion.

@Blossomtoes WTF is wrong with you??

Absolutely everything you’ve said is totally and utterly irrelevant.

look at yourself, calling the richest man on the planet a “dimwit”. You couldn’t make up your stupidity.

It’s not social services and no one is entitled to it.

It’s a privately owned business and he can charge you, or ban you at will.

One day you’ll grow up.

*people less likely to live near family or those they grew up with

😊

Culture has changed, due to low marriage rates, high divorce rates, smaller families, people lead likely to live near family or those they free up with, both parents working full time.

Society has changed, the invisible old and disabled are abandoned out of sight in permanent lockdown.

For many (including me) Twitter is also a place where you can hear from your community of practice (for me that's science communicators, general computer science / nerdy stuff, and people who teach programming). It's also a place to chat about random interesting things and also nonsense. I particularly enjoy the "your last text + 2024 is your next campaign slogan" genre of nonsense.

I've muted a LOT of words and phrases so fortunately I tend to miss out on the fightier bits of Twitter. There are loads of funny and warm people sharing their interesting and amusing thoughts there.

I also produce a fair bit of mildly technical 'how to' content myself, some of it is even quite useful I think :)

Agree with the idea that Twitter and things of that ilk can be a lifeline for many.

Jo

@Palmasailor

What the actual fuck is wrong with you?! Do you really not get it at ALL?! Twitter has been free since it started 16-17 years ago. FREE all that time. So of COURSE people are upset and angry at there being a charge now! Are you really that clueless?

Imagine offering something for free, and getting hundreds of millions of people involved in it - depending on it for their business and their livelihood and sometimes their mental health and well-being, etc, and regularly tweeting 1000s of tweets a year for 16 years (and being part of a massive community and having it a part of your life,) and then having it taken away JUST LIKE THAT, unless you PAY £130 a year. That is a lot of money for some people!

As I said quite a number of people see Twitter as a lifeline, as they are lonely and/or cannot get out of the house much, because of certain disabilities... and Musk is suddenly saying 'you know what you're going to have to pay over £130 pounds a year for it now!' Disgusting!

Just because that dimwit Elon Musk bought something that was already in financial trouble when he bought it - that doesn't make it right for him to suddenly start charging people to use it ... Yes, he can if he likes - but he can't expect people to stay. As a few people said upthread, many many people are going to leave because they won't pay. Especially as it's become a far left woke echo chamber now anyway with people being cancelled for fucking farting on a Sunday, and refusing to accept that women have penises. It's become quite toxic in part, and people ARE scared to say certain things, lest the vile far-left woke arseholes on there attack and denigrate them!

Nevertheless there is quite a lot of useful stuff on there, and quite a few nice people, and you do get to meet/communicate with people who are like you, and who you have things in common with.

Also, @Palmasailor as I said, it's a lifeline for a lot of people, especially people with disabilities. I find your 'suck it up and pay for it, why should you get it for free?' comments really revolting, repugnant, and ableist. You should be absolutely, utterly ashamed of yourself!

What did they do before Twitter?

I've just opened a couple tweets of tweets that had lots of replies (one had more than 1500) and still able to view tweets. I do need to be able to see tweets from a specific couple of accounts this week though, so for the rest of the week will either immediately go straight to those accounts as soon as I open the app, or if that doesn't work will unfollow everyone except those two account.

That's what happens if you don't work out what staff to sack carefully.

Did you all leave Facebook and insta when changes were made (without warning) meaning every other post you see is an advert?

This reminds me of all the people who said they’d leave the UK because “brexit” yet they are still here.