Twitter hasn’t been the same since Elon Musk bought it, anyone can see that. There has been a huge exodus of users to Mastodon and a lot of people have been complaining about the new features of the app and the numerous falls that the social platform has suffered.
4,000-character tweets, the Twitter Blue feature, the unclear method of verification and account, the elimination of free API access, the breakdowns of the app and the failures of the private accounts and Twitter Circles features are just proof that Twitter is in decline.
An article by The Verge compares how Twitter’s case is similar to other applications such as Tumblr or LiveJournal: both were abandoned after being sold to a new owner. In this article it is explained how the communities of these apps were more and more censored and the new buyers just didn’t understand how their platforms worked.
In these previous social platforms, the new buyers couldn’t control their audience, something that happened with Musk, offering new things that happened to be complete disasters and fighting people on the platform. Musk even publicly mocked a Twitter employee with a disability who was unsure if he was going to be fired.
The only thing that keeps Twitter going is that there’s nowhere else to go. But it’s important to remember that in every case of social media in history, it’s the users who decide whether these sites are viable or not.