[stillkicking]

Twitter hired tons of employees since 2020 so the apparent massive layoffs simply weren't. And there is a lot of dead weight at tech companies regardless.

Political pundits had a direct interest in sabotaging the perception of Twitter as an authoritative source of new information, and the coordinated attempts to get advertisers to pull out early on also point in this direction.

The reason they aren't talking about it anymore is because, by and large, this plan failed, and those predictions weren't predictions but wishes. Some groups slinked off to Mastodon, which works for niche communities, but doesn't work for the site at large.

[qup]

It's amazing to me how a couple hundred million people can be so compellingly influenced by such a small group of people, often with totally misaligned goals.

And the people just follow along.

Musk went from a golden boy to a global villain overnight without doing something wrong. He bought a company! God forbid, the new owner made a few changes! It's wild to me how fast it happened. Nobody really needed convinced, they're just predisposed to hate rich people.

[BoorishBears]

It's more amazing to me someone could write this comment in ernest.

Banning users for mentioning a competitor, banning ElonJet after specifically saying he wouldn't, banning journalists for covering it, not paying rent and custodial staff, rushed layoffs and ended up having to rehire people, firing people if they wouldn't agree to unpaid overtime in 24 hours notice, firing people for speaking poorly of the aforementioned mess, starting a half-baked verified program that allowed people to successfully impersonate multi billion dollar corporations, violating labor laws during the firings, purging Twitter's compliance team causing them to fall afoul of FTC regulations

That's the tip of the iceberg that you're labeling as "a few changes", and it is utterly hilarious that people's reaction to Elon is what you're saying is wild in terms of how quickly it happened... and not the bedlam Elon unleashed upon Twitter in the exact same amount of time

[jerojero]

I think you've missed the flurry of political opinions he's been giving in the past few months?

I think it's really these that have made him unpopular, he stopped just being a tech guy that's a little funny and so on and went "mask off". People did not like what he had to say, now, you might agree with most of his opinions or you might not be aware of them. But I would say largely the reason he's put a target on his back is not just because he bought twitter but why he bought twitter.

People weren't really predisposed to hate rich people, Elon Musk has been rich for decades. But the public opinion towards wealth concentration is changing, you're right in that. Is that a bad thing? I think what people saw is Elon Musk buying one of the largest public social media companies for vanity to the tune of a very, very, public trial. I mean he was forced to do it, he joked about it and then he had to pay; it was ridiculous! Right in the middle of an economic crisis as well.

I don't know, I am not surprised at all opinion on Musk has shifted. I don't think it has much to do with people "hating on rich people" as much as people just hating on Musk specifically because he's the naked king and everyone can see it.

[spoils19]

Overnight? Sentiment has been largely changing, for my own circle around the pedo comments, but for others much sooner.

It's amazing to me that people seem to be influenced by such a small group of people, and people just follow along!

[gus_massa]

> Political pundits had a direct interest in sabotaging the perception of Twitter as an authoritative source of new information,

It's weird that someone think that Twitter is an authoritative source of new information, but it's quite common. Politician fight using tweets. Journalist just dump tweeter threads into paper.

I think that this will save Tweeter. A distributed version like Mastodon can't be an authoritative source of new information. Which of the instance is the real one? I guess the only way to kill Tweeter is if one of the Mastodon instance get so big that becomes the "official" one and ever betray all the other instances disconnecting them.