Remember the age old addage: if the product is free...then YOU are the product. Social networks are free because you spend your time there, you're emotionally invested there, and you're handing over information about what you like/believe. Advertisers are able to use that information; the better the info, the more invested the users, the more it's worth. [
A facebook user is worth over $400 and a Twitter user is over $200]. [
Redditors, meanwhile, are worth 30 cents lol] and that, in part, is "Redditor" is an insult because so much of it is hot garbage*.
Tumblr was worth a button when it was bought by aol/verizion/oath because it had a ton of active, passionate users who spent a lot of time there. I was one of them! I constantly hit the daily post limit! And then, in an attempt to make it more advertiser-palatable, they banned porn. Turns out a lot of people like looking at porn on tumblr, so a ton of people left. That's why it was sold at a loss of over 99% of its value, it scared away all of its valuable users and the only ads people put on there were spam-y ads, like the kind you see at the bottom of articles on msn.com.
Gab, Parler and Truth Social are going to die because they are not going to have a source of income. No one is going to advertise on there. Politicians will, tiny companies will, but not Coke, not Ford, not the companies with billions in annual ad budgets (politicians have big ad budgets but that's not 24/7/365). Reddit is able to keep afloat because they're milking users for all they're worth with gold/plat/upvote coins or whatever the fuck.
Yes, Twitter is trying to diversify its income streams with Twitter Blue and the like...but if everyone flees because Elon buys it, well, not as many people are gonna buy blue. Assuming blue is $4 (which is what I've heard), that's 50 months of subscription to equal the value of a $200 user (this is, of course, ignoring the ~2.9% + 30c transaction fee from doing a credit/debit/paypal transaction, so it would be way more than 50 months). More people are going to leave than buy blue. Letting people like Trump and Russia Today back on is going to make big advertisers flee, and that's not going to be fixable. That's what happened after Jan 6, they paused all ads until places banned Trump. And it worked.
So if this does happen, unfortunately, I will do my part in destroying Twitter. I will be a weird furry/horny on main, I will bully every Tesla car I see, I will tweet about the apartheid emeralds and how PayPal is a piece of shit that nobody should ever use (unless they are forced to pay a company they don't like, then they should use PayPal to make that company's life a little worse). And I'll tweet about how Grimes and Chelsea Manning should continue with their scheme to get the most child support in the history of the world, because they deserve it, and it would be funny. [
aka this tweet]
The only reason the furry fandom hasn't been privately commoditized yet is because there are so many weird furries with weird kinks, no self-respecting company wants to risk attracting THOSE KINDS OF PEOPLE. But if we all turn into those kinds of people in a protracted, uncomfortably detailed TF sequence, we can turn Elon into the most miserable man alive. It's what he deserves.
*Yes, I'm aware not all of it. But my roommate finally quit it because the ones she goes on tend to be full of liberal young women and even THOSE communities were being filled with antisemitism
