For every user saying “fuck this” when being asked for onerous payments, I wonder how many are sticking with it? Not many…but not none, right?
Damn, he’s truly destroying what was once a great service. There are several accounts I follow just for that sort of information.
Maybe he figures that the MTA viewers ought to be paying for access to the information, and if the MTA starts charging for a subscription to view their Twitter feed, this way he can get a cut.
Jokes on Musk. Chicago Metra has never issued real time alerts. It’s always an hour or two after the fact.
Sometimes I check the Boston one to see how Charlie’s doing.
Every MBTA update is just this:
Deep cut. 
At this stage, I’m pretty confident that destroying the platform was the point all along - in which case he probably deserves a Nobel Peace Prize 
I keep saying that Musk always saw Twitter as an addictive video game that he keeps losing. He bought it in an attempt to get the cheat codes to play in god-mode. But since Twitter doesn’t work that way, he keeps losing, and he’s now resigned to flipping over the game board so nobody can play without him.
Aside from flawed motivations, his other problem was that he sees Twitter as a complicated technical/financial enterprise. It’s not complicated, it is complex. The problems aren’t technical, they’re social, and the “problems” he saw (the wrong people being popular) are only his his mind. They’re not aligned to the business model (which he doesn’t understand).
I don’t think he actually wanted to destroy Twitter and flush $44 billion down the drain, but he was always prepared to accept that outcome that as a consolation prize. If Twitter permits uncontrolled criticism of Musk and his flying monkeys, then Twitter must die, cost be damned. He can afford to lose that money, but he can’t tolerate losing that much face.
This is great news. Twitter is a private company. If “reporters” would stop quoting things posted on that platform, and if companies like the MTA refuse to pay to post, maybe the thing will finally die.
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” 
Corollary: “Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.”
True, but my desire for schadenfreude for a truly deserving asshole makes me want to think that Elmo is at least smart enough to realize that he’s made a shambles of the place. Users are leaving, advertisers have left, and the dysfunctional mess he created is now probably worth less than a quarter of what he paid for it, if he could find a buyer for it at all. I find it satisfying to believe that this is not what Boy Genius had in mind when he bought it, and that his desire to use it as a platform for self-aggrandizement has backfired rather badly.
To be fair, there are also technical problems to be solved. But they mostly revolve around doing computation at scale and maintaining uptime in the face of individual machine failures. But those aren’t the ones he’s actually interested in.
Remember that he didn’t want to actually buy Twitter at all. He wanted to back out of the deal, and the courts made him follow through. It’s a reasonable supposition that he made his offer with the expectation that he wouldn’t have to follow through and everything that happened after that was unplanned on his part.
Musk wants to use Twitter to resurrect ‘X’, the everything app. I’m not sure he cares much about Twitter as an advertising platform. He wants to make it a financial clearinghouse/payment/publishing system for the Internet.
I have no opinion on whether or not it’s a stupid idea. Just providing the info. Also, don’t undervalue the twitter database for AI training purposes.
And if there weren’t already a half dozen options for that, then it may be a visionary idea.
As a former product developer, I can see a lot of advantages to an integrated system.
Consider what content providers have to go through today. You put your video on Youtube, but unless you meet strict requirements it gets pushed down the rankings or demonetized, often with no warning. The algorithm changes without notice, possibly destroying your business model. You can’t monetize at all until you have something like 1,000 subscribers. Also, Youtube pays peanuts for many people, so they have to get their users to go to a site like Patreon, sign up, find them there, and donate money. Content providers are sick of Youtube and burning out on the demands of the algorithms, and Youtube is ripe for disruption.
In the meantime, paywalls are becoming increasingly annoying. Even if you pay for your favorite papers, if you browse the web at all you probably run into paywalls all the time for sites you’d never buy a subscription to because you only go to them when following a link.
Now imagine a system where content publishers can put their stuff, and people who like it can simply transfer a dollar or a penny or whatever they want to the provider’s account with a single click. Money is moved from their account to the provider’s. No patreon, no monetization rules. Pure peer-to-peer payment for service with no middlemen.
in the meantime, newpapers and other paywalled sources could be paid micropayments from Twitter if a twitter link to the content is followed. Maybe Twitter even pays for it out of the Twitter Blue subscription money, or gives you 100 free links before charging you a penny per view or whatever. Now magazines and newpapers get some moneg from people who would never buy a subscription.
If he can get other internet sites liike Amazon to accept payment from Twitter like they do Paypal, and you can connect your credit card to Twitter, you now have one site where you can do everything. Pay for goods, read anything on the internet, make content, profit from it, etc.
For content providers, if this model provides more profit than Youtube, they’ll all start cross-posting there and recommending that their viewers follow them there. If enough content providers go there, he might be able to bootstrap the other stuff profitably.
Also, this changes the nature of ‘content provider.’ Instead of being a full-time job and working your ass off to produce a video or post every day to stay up in the rankings, anyone who posts something that other people like can make money. I’m not a ‘content provider’, but I have written things on the internet that have gotten hundreds of thousands of views, and it would be nice to make money when lightning strikes.
You can’t really do that anywhere today that has a sizeable audience. But on a Twitter with peer-to-peer gifting, ANY post that takes off can make money. The barrier to entry is very low, so Twitter could see a lot of content production.
Now, I question whether this can work. I think regulatory issues have probably stopped this kind of thing before, and Musk is the kind of guy that will probably get himself in regulatory trouble anyway. But in concept, there’s a great idea in there.
I agree that “literally everybody in the world chooses my website as a middleman” is a pretty good gig if you can swing it.
This is the idea he’s attempting to sell now that he’s obviously destroyed Twitter as an ad platform. He knows how to do a PayPal, so he’s telling people this was his intent all along (when his actual intent, documented in court filings, was to avoid buying Twitter at all).
These are concerns that a company like Twitter must manage, of course. But AFAIK nobody argues that Twitter was struggling with capacity or availability at scale before Musk took over.
This wasn’t a problem Musk needed to solve or reinvent, it was just a known quantity that needs ongoing investment.