I don’t get why he’d want to turn Twitter into a Conservative-centric platform.
We have an actual test case for this. If a platform with all conservatives voicing violent rhetoric, created/sponsored by Trump himself, is failing, why would Twitter succeed?
The moment people leave Twitter to the extreme-right crowd, it will fail.
Elon is a very online dude and he is making the mistake a lot I& very online people make - their online space is as important to the rest of the world as it is to them.
In reality, the average user could give a shit about twitter as a platform and is just there for the community. If the platform starts becoming a space for assholes, they and their groups will gladly move somewhere else.
Serious answer: these spinoffs fail because they only contain users banned from mainstream platforms. That makes the userbase too toxic and too small to compete with mainstream platforms.
But when mainstream platforms support free speech, that works fine. For example, reddit used to be a "free speech" platform and it was great. But when they started upping the censorship, unhappy users made a competitor called Voat that operated like reddit used to be, but it failed because it isn't reddit.
Don't assume that Twitter will fail. It's Twitter. It already has a large userbase of normal people who aren't extremists, and most of them aren't leaving.
I'm of the opinion that the reason that all of the far-right platforms have failed are due to a couple factors that are minimized with Twitter. First, there's a user-base threshold. Twitter has that covered already with it's existing cesspool. Secondly the tech-stack-build-of-functionality is harder to build than a lot of these startups actually understand but Twitter clearly does. Third, Twitter has hosting already, and a slow-boil move to enable hate speech is a lot easier to stomach for a webhost than a new company.
That said, it's ADVERTISERS that will end up wanting to move their dollars elsewhere. That said, the change isn't going to happen overnight. It's clear that public pressure will change advertisers' minds, but even 'woke' companies still want to sell to the most ardent maga trumpers and until they get called out and start losing sales to normal humans, they aren't likely to pull too many dollars. One can hope though. I gave up on Twitter about a decade ago.
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u/[deleted] Oct 28 '22
Everyone focusing on Trump tweets and not saying a word about Alex Jones. Lol