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in reply to @pervocracy's post:

there's no way to tell, of course, but I'm guessing that Musk has been able (for the nonce, anyway) to draw quietly upon "wingnut welfare", i.e. he may be quietly borrowing money through indirect channels from the same crowd of fascist-minded capitalists who lurk in the background of American politics and funnel money into right-wing propaganda. I'm guessing that Musk hopes he can hold out until there's a GOP fascist administration in 2025 and then they'll effectively subsidize him. ~Chara

oh, he definitely is, but how deep are the pockets here? my guess/hope is that hundreds of millions per month is too steep even for the wingnuts, especially if it no longer represents "we control a major news platform" but just "we are a big forum for right-wingers to talk amongst themselves"

I think the value holds as long as institutions see the value in the place - as long as politicians, news outfits, cities, and the like are posting there out of reflex it doesn’t matter how few real people are. And they’re very deeply affected by the sunk cost fallacy.

The critical audience capture for Twitter was journalists and academics - I don't think anybody at Twitter ever quite realized that, whoever they were - and once the platform became cheerfully welcoming to 'murder all the journalists and academics', it was just a matter of time.

It's really quite impressive. I never thought you could kill a platform with as much lock-in of culturally-prestigious groups as Twitter had... but they managed it!

My lab used to research Twitter but ever since the API got decimated we haven't been able to get new data reliably. All of our current work on Twitter is being developed with tweets from pre-Elon times. We've noticed anecdotally that there is a pretty substantial shift in the Twitter discourse that's been getting rapidly worse but we aren't able to get data to actually verify that without the API.

Even though the stated reason for the price hike was targeting LLMs, bots, and third party clients, the cynics of the lab believe it was meant to target researchers. The new price is just out of range for the overwhelming majority of lab budgets; we would have to choose between funding Twitter or funding 2-4 graduate students' paychecks. Without researchers (academic or otherwise) able to scrutinize the platform, you can say whatever inflammatory shit you want and make it so difficult to measure the difference that no one tries