This is an absolutely brutal and spot on analysis. This dude is great.

The overwhelming majority of this revenue was from advertising, but according to Musk’s thesis that revenue stream was garbage. He would deprioritise ads, reduce moderation, and boost the posts of people who would pay $8 a month for a blue tick.

… So if someone is posting regularly enough to be willing to pay $8 a month for a blue tick, but has not built up a sizeable following organically, this is a very strong signal that the posts they are producing are no good.

It is exactly that content that Twitter’s new model relies on promoting – and those newly-minted blue ticks are quickly learning that there is no magic behind the checkmarks. New followers are not magically heading their way. The problem wasn’t a biased liberal algorithm, it was that their tweets are no good.

Republicans are a threat to democracy, and Musk is a Republican of the worst kind.

I guarantee Musk improved the possibilities of using Twitter for misinformation in upcoming elections on purpose. That’s by design, and probably the only real value Musk expects to get out of twitter by now.

Most users have not abandoned Twitter as it collapses. Mastodon gets mentioned much less than it did a few months ago, and while an invitation to Bluesky, backed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, was the hot ticket six weeks ago, most people seem to have shut up about it again by now. Twitter is still the best approximation of Twitter.

So to sum up his point, Twitter alternatives are failing because no one on twitter is talking about them. But takes like these are fundamentally missing the point, the people who pushed for those platforms have left for those platforms. They're not adding to the conversation on twitter anymore (why would they?) so what the author is seeing is an increasingly worse and worse circlejerk. Unreasonable and incorrect opinions become louder and more visible, gradually pushing reasonable people away as they each reach their individual tolerance levels for bullshit. You can watch it in real time right now on reddit, posts are getting more and more critical of the blackout protests. This is the true way a social media platform dies, mass sudden migrations are the exception, not the rule.