Sonic’s 30th anniversary was in 2021.

If the instances properly moderate according to their rules and ban rule-breakers, then yes.

The toxic users will coagulate into isolated instances instead

I don’t even want the people that are here to be here

I was never big on Twitter, I’m here thanks to Spez.

As much as I agree with the author, I’m also skeptical to bet against Musk.

On the other hand, Twitter is a mess he got himself into - not a project he actually pursued.

With that in mind I’ll give him (a very generous) 20-30% chance that X lives on to actually be a somewhat relevant platform of sorts and hasn’t gone belly up within the next two years.

Mostly because of the gravity Twitter had and the following that Musk has, not because the ideas seem like sound business concepts.

The problem was, and is, that Twitter was always a private for-profit company whose business model was tracking users and mining their private data. Yes, it could do good things, and in the hands of some of those opressive regimes it could do some bad things and in between it was built to do some skeezy things because that was how they attracted the venture capital.

Not to mention it was never innovative in what it was offering, there were and are many different avenues to connect people (that is the fundamental feature of the internet) it just created a platform that became popular for various reasons. Earthquake victims and rescuers, anti-government protestors and so on could always use Signal or another app for talking to each other - and should.

One of the real impacts of the cancer of Twitter came when journalists reached a critical mass and decided if something was tweeted about it counted as a primary source and they could write an article about it without having to get out of their chair. It was always lazy journalism and often totally irresponsible journalism and it’s no coincidence that the apex of Twitter journalism was the rise of an orange demented sociopathic rapist. All of which was part of the promise of a service that sold views and news by secret algorithm and cash.

Right. “Bumper sticker politics”

I’ve heard very few good ideas which can fit into 160 characters.

Advertisement has ruined journalism. Click-bait and light weight articles that lure people in to see as many ads as they can possibly cram between the lines and around the article, before they sell your reading patterns and digital fingerprint to the highest bidder.

Put words like Elon or Tesla in a headline and you get more clicks than if you didn’t. Bait the headline so people get curious and click in.

Make sure that you fill the top half of the page with generic text and copy-pasta so that you can show a few more ads before you actually come to the point of the article.

Use some AI to generate extra fluffiness or automate writing of sports and finance articles.

Social media certainly didn’t help, but when almost every news outlet wants to participate in the race to the bottom - a race to the bottom it is.

IMO the only way to fix it is a Time Machine. Every news paper linked here, or elsewhere, think they can sell me a subscription just because I followed a link or two. I live in Norway, I’m not going to subscribe to the New York Times just because they had an article I actually wanted to read.

It might not be perfect, but we need a system where journalists and media can be paid for creating quality content that people consume.

Not influencers who knows how to optimize the length of their YouTube videos to maximize income and minimize content.

Real deep journalism is dying. It’s a shame.