The sequence of events from Elon Musk acquiring Twitter to now is an incredible journey.

• Elon Musk bought a social media company for tens of billions, attempted to back out of the deal but couldn't because of his ineptitude by signing away the ability to reneg on the deal.^[1]

• Then there was the freedom of speech advocacy from Musk where he ultimately unbanned racists and then began sharing bigoted Tweets. But it's only freedom of speech for his bigoted supporters, when authoritarian governments ask Musk to censor people/tweets he abides by their requests.^[2]

• The site becomes inundated with the alt right, it's become rife with bigotry.^[3]

• There was the whole verified blue check mark debacle where verification became something you could pay for, with people making fake "official" accounts. For example a fake account impersonating a pharmaceutical company caused their stock to drop abruptly following a satirical tweet.^[4]

• Twitter engages in mass layoffs and multiple things break on the site. There are also reports that they can't pay rent in certain locations across the globe. Twitter is hemorrhaging advertisors, as they record a 59% reduction in advertisement sales.^[5]

• Elon Musk posts tweets seemingly apologizing for some of the changes and says he will follow the will of the people by posting polls for users to vote on policy changes. Musk asks if he should step down, to which the majority vote in favour of his removal. He then goes on a tirade about bots after losing in the poll. He goes on to say that only paid subscribers will be permited to vote in future polls. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.^[6]

• The crème de la crème is Elon Musk implementing a new restriction where you have to be logged in to see tweets and restricting the number of tweets you can view. Inadvertently DDOSing his own site.

1. New York Times - Why Elon Musk Can’t Back Out of Buying Twitter, According to Twitter

2. Forbes - Twitter Has Complied With Almost Every Government Request For Censorship Since Musk Took Over, Report Finds

3. The Atlantic -Twitter Is a Far-Right Social Network

4. Forbes - Fake Eli Lilly Twitter Account Claims Insulin Is Free, Stock Falls 4.37%

5. New York Times - Twitter’s U.S. Ad Sales Plunge 59% as Woes Continue

6. The Guardian - Elon Musk breaks silence after 10 million Twitter users vote for him to step down

Emeralds instead of gems would be more appropriate.

Missed a golden opportunity to use an emerald instead of generic gem.

They should use emeralds like those dug out of his dad's emerald mine

Not realistic, they'd make very random gem numbers to confuse people as much as possible.

"Buy 295 gems for $4, or for a limited time get 699 gems for $10! Subscribe now for 295 gems a week for one month! Recharge your tweet limit for only 365 gems!"

I was scrolling through "all" and thought this was a legit ad at first 😅

You have to remember, most apps and sites all boomed around (roughly) the same time.

I think it's a mixture of two things I saw other commenters say: investors demanding constant growth (I'm not one of those rabid anti-capitalists, but this cutthroat unforgiving attitude of boards and investors is NOT sustainable), and the other factor is these sites/apps focused on finding their niche and building an audience/userbase first and worried about monetizing second.

Since websites and apps all had the same start point just a couple of decades ago (for the oldest sites), it's not a huge surprise they're all running into the same dilemmas around roughly the same 5 year time span.

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd wager we'll see a few major companies rise up, build a huge audience, screw up the monetization, and drive everyone scattering to smaller sites/apps. Then in a few years one of those smaller apps has a good run, rises to the top, pulls all the users that were previously scattered, and then botches their own model eventually, scattering the users again. Rinse and repeat. Just my thoughts though

Quality shitpost

Spez taking notes for Reddit 3.0

Soon enough this will actually happen. There's no way they won't try to pull this shit.

The $4.20 is absolutely something he would do.

If I used Twitter this would be depressing, but I don't so it's hilarious.

Touch grass tokens

Literally pay to lose

Please drink a verification can to continue.

Elon Musk is the innovator of bad ideas.

The 10 gem pack (nice pack) has 11 gems drawn, literally unplayable.

this is gold

My dumbass is on here trying to click the red x to get that fool off my feed.

The most implausible thing here is that it only costs 1 gem.

Okay, that gem made me laugh.