It really feels like a lot of social media platforms are intentionally self-sabotaging themselves. I keep expecting them to die off every time something like this happens, but they appear to continue on regardless.

I think that social media sites actually dying off is actually impossible with enough inertia (even if their base decreases) and that's why they are emboldened to do such anti-consumer practices.

All this to say that I'm sure Steve Huffman has immediately started furiously texting everyone he knows about his new idea to charge for Reddit as well as a boosted version of Gold called "Alien Orange" or something.

I think he should seriously consider buying Meta so that we can watch it crash and burn just like Xitter. Facebook is the cancer of the internet and it deserves to go too.

if this was in lieu of data collection and tracking

I guarantee this isn't in lieu of, it's in conjunction with.

That's actually a good point about how some services do require payment to provide safe service to their users. A very close to home example would be your local Lemmy instance. In order to run the servers and keep it ad (and tracking) free, each instance needs donations from their users. The same is true for Mastodon, as you mentioned.

The problem is, I would be shocked if Twitter actually provided a safer (or improved in any way) service. There are a other issues at play as well, but they all basically boil down to most users not wanting too give money to Twitter, and if they were ok with that, they would already have purchased Twitter Blue.

I would love if there was a platform where they charged a very small amount monthly eg. I £1/€1/$1 in exchange for not using my data for anything. I love lemmy but I'm entirely at the mercy of the instance maintainers and there is no guarantee my data won't be used

Should we all go make twitter accounts and say how great of an idea this is?

Please remember that SpaceX and Tesla have entire teams dedicated to handling Elon and reversing his decisions. Twitter did not have the infrastructure required to handle the sheer level of stupid that is Elon Musk.

If he wanted Twitter to fail, he could have just unplugged all the servers and be done with it.

No need for him to change the policies so much everyone would leave, break his internet persona, and then declare Xitter bankrupt.

No, I believe he bought Twitter in order to manipulate the US presidential election by spreading propaganda from what he considers a "left-wing bubble". But because he has no idea how to run a social media, he is failing to keep it together and by now is throwing stuff against it to see what sticks.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." - Hanlon's razor

The biggest problem with Bluesky is it's owned by another musk.

Why Bluesky when there is ecosystem of dozens community-baked and deployed apps?

Is bluesky up yet? I'd assume everyone will just go to bluesky anyway.

$0.20 for every view of your tweet!

Yeah, it's both. Final answer.

He's had a fair bit of cosmetic surgery over the years. Things like hair plugs to jaw fillers

You mean like an idiot who paid billions of dollars for a company only to ruin it in less than a year?

an X-cretion.

In all seriousness, it's just called a post now. Elon threw away the incredible brand recognition of "Tweet," the noun/verb that every tech company wants. It's like if Google stopped wanting people to use their name as a verb and just go with the generic "search" term.

A xit?

I propose we use it like "I'm taking a xit"