Welcome to hell, Elon - The Verge
Nilay Patel,
The Verge,
Oct 31, 2022
This article was widely lauded as the best statement about Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter. "The problems with Twitter are not engineering problems," writes Nilay Patel. "They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway." There's truth to this remark. But you can't put 396 million users in to a single town square and not expect issues to arise. That fact is why Twitter (only the 15th most popular social network in the world) seems outsized, and why its problems magnify to become global problems. That's why politicians, propagandists and broadcast media celebrities are attracted to it. It's a platform for shouting, mass following, and mob behaviour, and that's what we get.
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