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Great write up, Max - I’m inclined to agree that the impact it’ll have on smaller voices could be significant. Twitter and the other social platforms have done an excellent job of killing a lot of local journalism and news - that consolidation of the attention economy doesn’t just ‘go back the way it was’ if Twitter stops being a reputable source for reporting.

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To answer Max's question ... the media will do their jobs.

If/when the Twitter well runs dry, Twitter will just be one less distraction. Journalists will have to gather news just like before 15 years ago: cultivate sources, conduct research and press for records.

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For whatever reason, I don’t feel like Twitter has changed very much since Musk took over. What has really changed? It still feels the same to me on there.

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I have noticed many changes. First the technical, some strange behaviors in the interface, that feel like someone is tweaking the CSS on the fly. The presentation of notifications has become haphazard. They still are there, but I think the zeal to segregate the "Verified" to have the new blue check army led to some wonky display issues. Then there has been a degradation of the timeline. If I scroll far enough, I will see the same tweets over again. As if they run out of new things to show me, so they just re-roll the history. First couple of times I scrolled back up and indeed verified it. Now I just ignore.

Second the coarseness of discourse. I follow a pretty wide swath of people, many from the LGBT community, and posts that would have caused a suspension of an account seem to just hang out there, as if the mechanism for automatically limiting the account, and then disposition (permanent suspension, or temporary suspension) are not working anymore. It is as if the bad actors keep trying to test the boundaries.

Still, for the latter, it is not as bad as I expected, but I keep a pretty close eye on it.

I fully expect the "Hardcore" pivot to go very poorly. It is past 5:00EST on Thursday, and who knows how many people pumped their fist to sacrifice any semblance of work-life balance, but I have to assume that a lot of really good people will hit the exits, people with a lot of institutional knowledge that will be well neigh impossible to replace in the medium term.

I still spend too much time there (I have a lot of friends that I have gotten close to on the platform) and Mastodon is definitely not a replacement. I will just drift away one day.

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Fascinating. I truly haven’t noticed anything much out of the ordinary and I like being able to separate the verified mentions. However, I mostly look at lists I’ve put together vs my home feed.

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Please do not try to do a markdown table *in email* ever again.

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You’re not the boss of me!! I do what I want!!!

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