Well, treat it as another data point. The biggest issue Twitter is facing yet is the fact it's losing billions a year and no solution in sight to mitigate those losses.
1. Twitter is showing individual tweets without login again.
2. It also spills out user profile pages and some other details if you go through the tweet embedding format, but also if you add some headers in requests for normal pages (like declaring you're Googlebot).
The way Twitter's changes are implemented are haphazard and quickly worked around. Not to mention partially reverted after user outcry.
It's all just Elon Musk noise. This is not how you run a company.
There may have been a spike in interest in Twitter around October 2022, when Musk bought it. And this is now coming down to the "usual". But I think it's not just that. Would be curious to see trend from last 24 mo as well.
This is the CEO of Cloudflare BTW. He wouldn't post this as bait for the likes. I believe at the very least he finds this a reasonable and telling trend.
There's a third option in which Elon gives up Twitter to less emotional management who will hopefully undo some of the platform destructive choices he took.
There's a reason people don't use Voat, reading blue badge twitter is very reminiscent of that.
People don't use voat because it shutdown 2 years ago... Voat had an extremely poorly designed server architecture that cost about 100x what they needed and had frequent outages. The founders were very unreceptive to suggestions and IIRC even wanted to make the site costly to maintain because they thought it would look good to investors.
I think you’re both right at different levels: the only way a pariah site can survive is by being cheap enough that a few dedicated people can fund it – 4chan/8chan stuck around for years despite no sensible investors or advertisers wanting to be seen anywhere near them because their operating costs didn’t require huge resources. Sites like Voat or Truth Social, and now Twitter, suffer because they try to be like mainstream platforms but can’t generate the same kind of revenue.
So my option is to choose Elon's right wing echo chamber? (Of course, one doesn't have to pick Threads - the ultimate outcome on Twitter's traffic is the same.)
The Blue echo-chamber* is so, so much worse.
* Because Elon has become politicized, paying for Twitter Blue has become politicized. Because of this, the people paying for Blue are people politically aligned with Elon. As Twitter Blue replies are boosted to the top of any reply section, there is an inherent echo-chamber in Twitter replies these days.
You know what? I was just talking to my mom and she kept asking ”When are we finally going to get that left-wing echo chamber we've been talking about all these years?”
In other words, the operation completed successfully, and the patient is dying.