We're in Denial About the True Cost of a Twitter Implosion
https://www.wired.com/story/musk-denial-true-cost-twitter-implosion/WHEN I OPENED Twitter one day a couple of weeks ago, the first piece of “news” I read was that Sam Bankman-Fried killed Jeffrey Epstein. I was never a super-user, but my feed used to feel more relevant and coherent than that. In the first days after Elon Musk sacked the platform, the prospect of Twitter actually collapsing felt like a tail-end risk, something to meme on Twitter: Musk photoshopped onto the Game of Thrones Iron Throne surrounded by ashes. Or its end was presented as a moral necessity, something righteous users who hated Musk would effect by quitting.
Among the users I follow, the mood on the app ever since has resembled the giddiness of 2 am in a dorm room just after the last joint has been smoked, when it’s not clear whether the party is cresting—whether this is the part you’ll remember, the epic hour-long stretch your best man will reconstruct a decade later at your wedding—or whether the party is over and the coolest people have already left. People have tried to keep up the fun by outdoing themselves with jokes and bravado. "If Twitter dies," one friend bragged, “[you will] find me in the woods, no phone. I’ll be so happy.”
But something really is breaking. Things are falling apart. Teams of engineers and moderators have been eroded to nubs. Bugs have begun to multiply as software rot spreads: On Sunday, a tool gone rogue began blocking 4,000 accounts per second. On Tuesday, fleets of influential professors mysteriously lost all their followers. Sewage from newly unbanned, hateful accounts is bubbling out of Twitter’s drains. My own posts are being colonized by anti-Semitic bots and so-called elite business professors—all verified with blue checks—hawking bitcoin giveaways. I have only 5,000 followers, so the fact that these actors are desperate enough to target me feels ominous.
It’s all getting less funny and more scary and sad, fast. This grief, I think, is widely experienced, but it’s barely yet been reckoned with. Most people, even analysts, are trapped talking about Twitter as something whose demise we’ll relish—either as a liberation or as the gripping psychodrama of one bitter billionaire, his karmic comeuppance. Twitter, everyone notes, is far from the biggest social network.
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Many here make fun of Twitter or have a real hate for it..... but to tons of people it's been their safe place, just like DU is to many of us.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I'm withholding my "certains" altogether when it comes to what's happening with Twitter, but definitely interested. All possibilities seemingly astonishingly open...!
It truly sucks that Elon's been brainwashed by white nationalists and MAGA fans into turning Twitter into the cess pool that it's become. I feel like this was a political hit job and revenge for 2020 / Jan. 6th. If there is a hell, it waits for him. 
"denial" requiring more thought.
I've been chuckling (in my better moods) for weeks now at post after post from people who openly claim to have never even visited Twitter (or just once and horrors!) but are seemingly ready to go to the stake for their opinions of it nevertheless.
Yet this is on DU -- also a social media platform/site that frequently exemplifies what some of the most righteously antagonistic posters deplore unseen on Twitter. Oh, my social media people. 
I agree that all those whose participation on Twitter made it an asset to humanity will continue there or reform elsewhere after a disruption.
And that the others will do the same.
"Flee Twitter? My dear, I'm an anthropologist."