Comment by dan-robertson

My impression were that Twitter’s problems included:

1. Not having that much revenue

2. Being expensive to run

Firing a bunch of people probably helped with #2. But there are definitely engineering problems in there too. For #1, there was the whole verified checks thing but I think that’s not going to bring in anywhere near as much money as ads did. Seems one good thing to do there is not upset advertisers. Currently advertisers seem upset. An alternative would be allowing more advertisers, eg gambling ads are quite lucrative.

The whole censorship/hellsite stuff doesn’t strike me as such an immediate problem – I think Twitter could have done ok for a while with the previous moderation policy changing at the previous rate. Though figuring out better things to do there would probably be necessary in the long term and something a private company might better be able to do, eg figuring out how to focus on the long-term interests of users rather than numbers that shareholders think are important.

But maybe I’m totally wrong and if Elon wasn’t seen to be doing things about censorship the whole thing would fall apart?