Hmmm... so me and Caleb (our dm) were theorizing why Musk is a moron and we came to theorize this: perhaps he isn't. Perhaps he is ostracizing the public so that it can become a social network for the rich and connected so that he can maximize profit.
He makes little to no money on the public, but privatizing the whole thing for the wealthy does make him money and prevents the expensive overhead of running and entirely free social network. By ostracizing the poorer masses they open up the space to become only something for the rich. Ultimately it's still really shitty for those of us rehomed, but perhaps this is what they wanted all along. I mean, since they're all about profit it would make sense that excluding the public in favour of privatized self important egotists makes sense. They get to take an established app with all the infrastructure built in and turn it private with just a few changes.
This is far easier than establishing a brand new app. In addition, ads don't go as far as they used to, and since laws about selling people's data takes that revenue stream away, privatizing for the rich is the only way to really make it profitable. It's super underhanded and it's a disgusting move to make, but if it goes the way ue's trying to push it he might not be as stupid as we're all accusing him of. I'm seriously hoping it's sheer stupidity though :/
Saw this on Facebook earlier today... I guess our theory was sadly correct :/ dang it! Our two accounts were doing super well and we're in the middle of relaunching the Throne of Dice podcast which is closing in on 1500 followers after returning from a 2 year hiatus. I know that metric matters very little here, but for twitter it was how you meassured your potential tweet reach for things like episode updates which turning into potential watch time on Spotify. This sucks! All the networking capabilities with other podcasters and all of the reach options are just kind of dead now. There's no other platform that helped us build community like this and it's a little scary having to start from scratch and not knowing where our friends will land or about the different posting culture on different apps. What do we put our time and effort to? How are we going to get to a place that feels stable again? We feel left with many questions and many frustrations as corporate greed kills off this once-great form of connecting with other podcasters. The biggest annoyance has also been the community's refusal to pick a place and simple go there. I find it hard to believe we won't be completely fractured by this. Finding each other will be hard.
