I hate the guy and how he treats employees but let's be real, there's enough people in twitter forced to stay to keep it going due to personal constraints like visas and the Elon cult of personality will attract the remaining missing headcount. Twitter's core functionality seems to be robust even if small features here or there break for a few weeks. The social network has enough inertia to keep going for a few years and a niche where competition like mastodon are terrible. The real challenge will be to reverse the network's slow but steady decline and monetize the platform, but Twitter can keep going in a zombie state for a long time....unless a competitor comes in and decidedly crushes it, which is unlikely to happen.
Meanwhile, TikTok is kicking Facebook’s ass. The truth is, people will find the next trendy and popular platform. If one does not innovate and keep with the trend, I am not if it can survive long, especially in the social media space.
The weird thing about twitter is that it has this network of addicts with relatively high positions of power like politicians, journalists, and academics and there's no other social network yet that is competing for that pool
True, OP. My partner is in the healthcare / research space, and some amount of knowledge sharing takes place on Twitter. She and her colleagues won’t quit unless the entire thing burns to the ground or some viable alternative is built. (And no that isn’t Discord or Mastodon in their current form.)
Will it survive as in exist in a year? Probably. Will it become profitable or better? No.
Twitter will be the next Zanga and Tumlr. A place where people go for porn.
Tumblr’s fall after the removal of bewbs was bonkers. Elon will find a way to monetize that audience.
This is probably accurate. If Elon monetizes it, then it becomes an onlyfans
Don’t bet against Elon is generally a good rule of thumb.
The interesting thing is Elon has several companies that will replace some of those which left!
Several large advertisers have already left, others are expected to follow. Twitter may survive, but will it ever be profitable?
Twitter will survive but it's not gonna be the same. It'll be much less credible with the new paid verification system that allows impersonation much more easily so I predict a lot of the companies and institutions that used Twitter as a primary outlet for announcements will go somewhere else. Heavily relaxing or removing the content policing like Elon was talking about doing will be the final nail in the coffin. If Twitter becomes a true free for all it's gonna be overrun with spammers, illegal shit, disinfo/propaganda and people spewing hate speech. Elon won't go that route if he has any sense. Even 4chan (and 8chan to a lesser extent) still have some moderation and rules against posting the worst shit and spamming.
Twitter would have survived but declined under the prior leadership. Elon’s leveraged buyout added $13 billion in junk interest loans to Twitter’s books. That means Twitter, already unprofitable, need to raise revenues by a billion a year just to service the loans. So you’d expect Elon to court advertisers and add compelling features. But instead he’s letting pranksters impersonate brands and is tweeting Facebook boomer tier fake news sites at elected officials. Advertisers are deserting the already miserable conversion rate Twitter offered, and subscriptions are like 2% of the loan service costs. Plus he keeps firing staff; already we have performance problems and 2FA malfunctions as he “turns off the microservices” (whatever that means). He could bail it out himself, but of course he put the loans on Twitter’s books because he didn’t want to do that. And any serious selling of SpaceX or Tesla to pay Twitter’s bills could pop their GME ape-driven bubbles. I anticipate a severe cash crunch. How he’ll react is an open question.
Twitter will survive. Engineers dont realize how non-essential they really are
But who’s going to pay for it. He’s alienating the very groups that are addicted and likely to pay. He can save a ton by firing people, but then what?
This sounds right. Twitter will survive and Elon haters will seethe.
Twitter will survive in the way that 4chan has survived
It will definitely go the 4chan route. If that’s a success to people who get something out of seeing the haters “seethe”, it speaks volumes of those simping.